


Cyclamen

by CatieBrie



Series: Guilted in Gold [1]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Alchemist!Ed, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark, Detective!Mustang, Ed Swears, F/M, FMA Big Bang 2017, Fae & Fairies, M/M, Mage!Mustang, Minor Character Death, Multi, Teacher!Ed, Trans Male Character, Urban Fantasy, modern!Amestris, with Magic!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-03
Updated: 2018-02-11
Packaged: 2019-01-08 12:22:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 50,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12254307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CatieBrie/pseuds/CatieBrie
Summary: Edward violently denies the existence of magic. Roy is a State recognized Mage.  Alphonse is sick and all research into the cause--both mundane and alchemical--has turned up nothing.Yet, despite Edward’s protests that magic is nothing more than a flashy form of alchemy (expletives excluded), it exists and it’s coming for him in a very real way.(12/30/18 On official hiatus. but not abandoned!!)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally a contribution to the FMABB2017 but it kind of took on a life of its own that stretched well outside of the event, sooooooooooo welcome to this monstrosity (which I am super proud of, fight me!). Like faeries, magic, alchemy and enemies to lovers fic?? Well, have I got a story for you!
> 
> I have to start this with a HUGE shoutout to my dear friend Kat for literally coming into my apartment and badgering me to get this written. Her editing and cheerleading have been invaluable in keeping me motivated to finish what is now the largest thing I've written for fandom. 
> 
> And the last shoutout goes to [Cade](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12258003/chapters/27855387), who gave this the last lookover it needed and gave ME that last boost of confidence I needed to post. I linked directly to their BB contribution because it's a fucking awesome story
> 
> [EDIT 11/25: This fic is part of a series!]

She was a small thing, not a breath beyond the age of four.  When she touched the ground flowers bloomed wide to her fingertips, soft caresses in answer to her unconscious call. She hadn’t shown her dad yet, she wanted to make the whole garden bloom before she did. She wanted to show him something beautiful, something impressive.  Beside her, her dog sniffed at the new blooms and huffed at them, the tiny spots of pink and yellow and purple bending under his hot breath.  She laughed at him and made more.

She trailed her fingers through the grass and they ran up against the bald, bright head of a mushroom, slick with dew. Curious, she poked it and giggled when it bounced and jiggled like the belly of her uncle when he laughed.  She noticed other spots of red, flared caps, orange-rimmed and cheerful, stretching out into a circle right in the center of her back yard.  She had heard of these; her dad told her stories of the faeries and their mushroom rings.  “Don’t step into one, darling. You’ll upset the faerie who lives there,” her dad had warned, tickling her sides. “You wouldn’t want a stranger just barging into your house, now would you?”

 _I’d be happy if a faerie came into_ our _house_ , she thought, pushing up from the ground and swaying on clumsy knees. Her dog padded heavily behind her, a solid weight in case she stumbled over. He did not, however, seem keen to step near the circle, eyeing it warily. She sketched a little curtsy.  “Hello, faerie person, can I come in?”

A faint breeze wove through her hair in response, bringing with it the scent of blackberry flowers and summer and a chiming of laughter like tiny bells. She smiled, warmed by the playful wind, and stepped carefully over the spongy mushrooms to enter the ring. Her dog barked in alarm, large mouth snapping at the place where her skirt rustled as if to pull her back, but he was too late. In an instant her backyard disappeared, distorted as if she’d just spilled water over a wet painting and then dragged a paintbrush through the mess.

Where she had stood, cyclamen bloomed, bladed white petals reaching up to the bright midday sky even as the faerie ring sank back into the earth. Mournful howling split the clear air.

—

“Brother, be careful. Brother... _Edward_! Oh, for goodness—”  

Ed came to an abrupt halt, pulled short by Al’s hand hooked into the collar of his shirt. Fabric dug into his trachea hard enough that he choked and dropped the book he’d had his nose buried in right onto his flesh toes. Pain lanced out like wild fire, throbbing in time with his heartbeat like a chanting taunt.

“Shit-fuck- _ow!_ What gives, Al?”   

“I’m sorry, but you wouldn’t stop!” Al raised his hands open-palmed between them and then sighed through his nose. Ed wrinkled his own nose at him and stooped to grab his—stupidly fucking heavy monster of a—textbook. “You almost stepped into a faerie ring. I tried to warn you, but you never listen when you’re reading and really, you shouldn’t read and walk anyway, that’s—”

“You stopped me for a fuckin’ faerie ring?” Ed scoffed, pausing in the retrieval of his book from where it had landed beside a rounded mushroom so that he could glare properly up at Al. “Have you been hanging around Ling again? If he’s filling your head with that fuckin' magic bullshit I’m banning him from the apartment.”

Al muttered something beneath his breath that sounded suspiciously like— _as if you could stop him—_ which was true, the bastard was sneaky as fuck, but that didn’t mean Ed wouldn’t do his damndest to—Ed’s thoughts clipped short as Al said in a louder voice, “It really doesn’t hurt to be careful, though, does it?”

“It does when your stupid carefulness is based on superstitious bullshit. Look—” Ed unfolded from his crouch, book in one gloved hand and the other hand gesturing at the tiny circle of mushrooms hiding in the grass at his feet. The mushroom circle stretched out roughly the width of his boot and the caps on three of them flared out flat and slightly tilted to the ground; the rest looked like scaley eggs the size of his thumb. He would have stepped directly in its center if Al hadn’t freaked out and yanked him back. “—Faerie rings are just the mycelium fruiting after it's sucked all the nutrients outta the soil. Ain’t nothing supernatural about it.”

“But still…”

“For fuck’s sake.” Ed went to lift his shoe, fully intending to prove his point by stepping into the center of the tiny ring, but once again he found himself yanked back by his shirt.

“ _Brother, don’t!”_ Al fixed him with wide, pleading eyes, the kind of expression Ed could never say no to. After a long, angry moment of glaring, he caved.  

“Fine, fine, whatever. See, look, I’m stepping around the damn thing so you can _stop looking at me like that._ ” Ed turned away sharply, freeing his field of vision of a pouting Al and opening it up to their campus. He hadn’t realized they were even in the vicinity of it until that very moment—the walk from their apartment took at least twenty minutes. He couldn’t have been reading that long, right? “When did we get here?”  

Al favored him with a long-suffering eyeroll—Ed didn’t have to look to know when his brother was being a (perfect, insufferable, gift-to-this-green-earth-of-a) brat—and said, “this is why you shouldn’t read and walk. It’s impossible to get through to you without physical force. I swear someone could stab you while you were reading and you wouldn’t look up until the knife was halfway through your ribcage. And  _that_ would only be to complain about how the blood was obscuring the pages.”

Ed, who’d been flipping through the pages to find his spot, stopped short. “That’s graphic. And I’d totally notice a piece of fuckin' metal trying to carve my heart out!”

“Uh-huh, I believe you.”

“Just because I fucking focus while I research doesn’t mean I’m fucking oblivious to my surroundings.”

“It totally does. You're the most oblivious person I know.  And I’m including Ling in that assessment.” Al smiled innocently at Ed's scowl and he debated if it would be worth the effort to trip him. It wouldn’t, Al would just drag him down with him and they’d both end up covered in dirt and grass stains. Ed had a class to teach and he already pushed the boundaries on appropriate attire by completely ignoring them; he should avoid walking in like a barnyard heathen whenever possible.

“I’ve watched you walk into automatic doors while reading.  _Automatic doors_ , Brother.”

“Traitor.” Ed stalked ahead, scuffing his boots hard enough to tear up the grass as he eschewed the sidewalks leading up to Central University and cut across the patches of green. Al’s laughter followed behind him, but he ignored it, trying to slip into the pages again; Al stopped laughing and started to cough, the sound muffled in a way that meant he was trying to keep Ed from hearing. Reflexive worry chewed away the last of Ed's concentration.

“Hey, you good?” Ed asked when Al caught up with him. Al favored him with an exasperated huff, bumping shoulders as they approached the automatic doors to the main library. It was early enough that only the little cafe tucked up against the entrance bustled with activity, but until finals rolled around they could always rely on a table or two remaining open there. “You wunna go back and rest at the apartment today?”

“I’m fine, Brother,” Al said. He shrugged his messenger bag off and handed it over to Ed as they stepped into the warmth of the cafe. The line was just five scruffy students deep and only the baristas moved around with any real energy. “Grab us a table and I’ll get us coffee.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Ed snatched the bag and dropped it down on the bench of the first free booth he saw; he leaned against the table to watch Al for signs of fatigue as he waited. Standing in line, Al looked fine if not a bit pale, but Ed felt justified in his worry, remembering past fits. A cough could precede a collapse, it had before. Al caught him staring and rolled his eyes at Ed, indicating with his hand that he should sit. Ed refused.  

“I told you I’m fine,” Al said when when he returned to the table. He shoved an oversized paper cup at Ed that Ed had to scramble to catch before it fell to the dusty floor and Al dropped onto the bench with his back to the door. When Ed was certain he had a firm grip on his coffee, Ed sat opposite of him. Al unpacked his bag, battered laptop taking up a place of reverence in the midst of borrowed texts. “You shouldn’t worry so much, I'd let you know if I wasn’t fine.”

“Bullshit.” Ed added his own texts and notebooks to the mess; as an afterthought, he also tugged out his laptop. The chance of it actually starting up was about as likely as a breakthrough in his research, but hope sprung eternal.  

“I’m not you, Brother,” Al said dryly and then just stared at the mess they’d made of the table. Ed pushed a finger against one of the stacks of notebooks and watched it landslide across the last span of available space. “Besides, I’ve spent too much time in the apartment as it is. I can’t keep relying on my classmates for notes.”

“Ya wouldn’t have to rely on ‘em if you’d stuck with online classes,” Ed mumbled and immediately felt guilty for it. Ed didn’t _really_ want Al to hide away from the world; to keep someone so admirable from interacting with others was nothing less than a crime against humanity. So when it came to Al’s well-being it didn’t matter what Ed _wanted_ to do. He would just have to fret from the sideline, but that wouldn’t stop him from trying to meddle. “I could sit in on ‘em, your real classes—I don’t think any of ‘em overlap with mine this semester…”

“Brother, you barely have time as it is.” Al swept his hands over their cluttered table for emphasis. “You don’t need to take on my research along with your own. It’s bad enough that you’ve thrown away so much of your life on _me_ as it is.”

“I can totally fuckin’ sit in on your classes. That ain’t that hard, just taking notes. And it’s not like I’m getting anywhere—” Ed choked off his sentence. That sounded a lot like he’d given up, didn’t it? Ed felt his face heat with instant shame, stricken by his own careless words. What if Al thought he didn’t care? They’d been stuck for ages now, neither alchemic nor medical research revealing an inch on the cause of Al’s illness. “I mean, I just think a break is a good idea’s all—I’m not giving up, I promise. Maybe if I stopped teaching I could dedicate more time to researching why ya—”

Al reached out and placed a slim hand against Ed’s gloved one, the pressure sensors in his automail alerting him to the touch and snapping him from the whirlwind that had caught up his thoughts and whipped them about. Then he said, as if he could simply pick those thoughts straight out of Ed’s skull,  “Brother, hey, it’s alright. I know you’re trying. We both are. You love teaching, so you better put that idea out of your head for good.”

“And we need the money,” Ed added with a slight nod. Al sighed heavily, perpetually exasperated with Ed.

“Yes, well, if that keeps you from quitting something you actually enjoy doing, fine, think of it that way.”

There was a pause that Ed read as a _but._

“...but maybe,” Al said after a minute and the pressure sensors indicated Al had squeezed down, harder than he would have on Ed's flesh hand. Al inhaled and then exhaled in a rush. “...Maybe we should try something else. I noticed they’re offering a special lecture on the concepts of magic this quarter and I thought maybe I'd ask the instructor if he could point me in the right direction. If alchemy has medical applications, then certainly magic must as well and you said it yourself, we aren’t getting anywhere with our current avenues and—”

Ed balked, spine snapping straight as he leaned away from Al. “ _No fuckin' way_. Absolutely not. We won’t gain anything from fucking around with that bullshit. We’ll figure it out, Al, we will. We just haven’t been looking at the problem correctly. Maybe if I work through my thesis again from a different angle—”

“Edward!” Al snapped, golden-olive eyes narrowed in a way Ed had only ever seen on their mom when he'd done something particularly stupid. “I know how you feel about magic, I really do. I can’t say I understand it and I’ve tried to be patient with you, but we're getting _nowhere_ and I don’t understand why you can’t set aside your prejudice long enough to properly eliminate the possibility.”

“It's because magic's just flashy fuckin' alchemy and I’ve worked every alchemical angle I can think of and— _are you fuckin' stalking me, Mustang!?”_

\--

Roy forgot to buy coffee. A heinous misstep on his part as it meant he had to wake up even earlier than intended so that he could buy something overpriced on campus. He remembered a small cafe, warm and welcoming near the Alchemy Complex that he had frequented the last time he guest lectured at Central University, _Central Perk,_ and it was there that he now stood, not entirely sure how he managed to wake up and get himself there in the first place. He allowed the buzz of half-conscious students to wash over him as he waited for his name to be called. When it was a shout followed loud enough to jolt Roy right to wakefulness.

“Are you fucking stalking me, Mustang!?”

“ _Brother_.”

This early in the morning _Central Perk_ was crowded, full of students desperate for a hit of caffeine to get them through their lectures, but the two voices carried over the sound of coffee grinding and baristas calling out orders and names. Several customers swiveled behind Roy and then focused on him; Roy sighed, grabbed his order, and fixed a bland smile in place before facing Edward Elric.

“Ah, Edward, it has been awhile,” Roy said pleasantly, stepping away from the counter to approach the booth Edward and his brother occupied. A few curious customers surreptitiously kept watch and Roy recognized a few faces from his eight a.m. lecture.  _Perfect_.  “I apologize for not noticing you when I came in.”

“If that’s a short joke…” Edward growled and his brother groaned, dropping his head into his hands. While taller, the other Elric was thin and pale and sickly looking when placed next to Edward’s varying shades of brilliant gold. In the space between them a mountain of books and papers took up every inch not occupied by their own drinks and battered laptops; among the mess Roy saw both mundane medical texts and alchemical ones (and even a tome in Xingan that Roy assumed was of a similar theme even if the title was too obscured by papers for him to read).

“Of course not.” Roy said, not dropping his bland smile. Tension dripped from the edges of both brothers and Roy wondered if he had been dragged into the aftermath of an argument; he thought it wise not to pry. Edward eyed him warily as if he expected something underhanded from Roy and Roy obliged, if only to redirect the strained atmosphere. “It is not your fault these booths are built for the average person.”

Edward snarled but before he could launch into a rant, his brother smacked him over the head with one of the many notebooks littering their table. “Brother, really, can you at least pretend to be professional where your students can see you?”

“He started it.”  

“That argument only works for elementary kids.” Al turned sharp, nearly-gold eyes on Roy. They stood out starkly against the exhausted thumb-print bruises inked beneath his eyes.  “I’m terribly sorry for his behavior, Mage Mustang, he’s always like this. But in his defense, you did provoke him.”

“Detective is fine,” Roy said as Edward made a disgusted face at his brother; Roy schooled his features into sheepishness as he chewed over the fact that Al even knew of him. “And I must apologize as well, it is rather early and I admit, Edward and I have a bit of history. You must be his brother…?”

“Alphonse, sir, but Al is fine. I’ve heard a bit about you from Brother, thank you for taking care of him.”

“ _Taking care of me_?” Edward scoffed, gloved fingers hooking to carve exaggerated quotation marks into the air. “What am I, five?”

“Sometimes I wonder,” Alphonse muttered darkly and Edward seized the chance to take his revenge, swatting his brother back with the same notebook. He did it lightly, though, surprising Roy with his gentleness.

“I’ve gotten nothing but grief and idiotic nonsense from this bastard.” Edward’s frown turned into a mocking grin as he directed his attention back on Roy. “You still think magic’s real?”

“Honestly, Brother, can you at least try to be civil?”

“Why should I be? He’s the fake-ass alchemist trying to convince the world of some boundless power source with his flashy fuckin' flames and—”

Roy took a sip of his coffee to hide the tightening of his lips. He expected nothing less from Edward, even if it had been a year since they last met in person; however, Roy really didn’t have the energy to start into that argument again. He ignored the jibe completely and went about satisfying his curiosity. “Did I hear Alphonse correctly in that you have students now? I see you’re doing better for yourself.”

“The fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

“That I am simply glad you seem to have your life together.” Roy kept his tone pleasant, innocent and false. Edward was nothing but electricity and needle edges, impossible to approach without getting stung and yet Roy kept prodding. “The last time I checked, you still—”

“I’ve got myself on the straight and narrow, _Detective_ , so fuck off with your stalking.”  

“If only I had the spare time to do any such thing. Alas, I am simply here to lecture. No stalking—intended or otherwise.”     

Ed frowned fiercely. “Fuck, you’re teaching again?”

“He’s the one teaching the _Concepts of Magic_ class I mentioned earlier,” Alphonse interjected and the look Edward shot his brother was nothing short of betrayed. Had that been the source of the earlier tension?

“That is the one, speaking of which—” Roy said with an exaggerated glance at his wristwatch. “—I really must be going. Alphonse, it was a pleasure to meet you. Edward, it was...something. Stay out of trouble.”

Alphonse’s response was negated by Edward’s “Oh, fuck _you_.”

\--

Ed glared down Mustang’s back until he disappeared out through the cafe doors; he settled back against the booth and took a gulp of his cooling coffee. Al watched him silently, lips quirked in a way Ed didn’t trust. Ed did his best to ignore him as he shuffled through his notebooks. He lasted a minute.

“What is it?”

“You didn’t tell me he was hot, Brother.”  

Ed choked. “ _What?_ ”

“Mage Mustang, you didn’t tell me he was so enticing. Is this why you were always getting into trouble when you were here on your own?”

“The fuck're ya on about?” Ed snapped as his cheeks heated. He slammed the edges of the notebooks in his hands against the table to align them; their corners bent and the covers wrinkled. “He ain’t hot and stop calling him that. It’s a false fucking title—ain’t no such thing as magic, just flashy—”

“— _alchemists with over-inflated egos and flares for drama_.” Al quoted at him in an unfortunately accurate approximation of Ed’s tone, but otherwise entirely wrong. Where were the expletives? “I know, Brother, but it _is_ an official title.”  

“Official titles ain’t worth shit,” Ed grumbled as he dropped the abused notebooks back to the table. He remembered what Al had said when Mustang was being a condescending asshole and his earlier temper returned. Ed jabbed an accusing finger at Al. “You were going to jump into that asshole’s class? You fuckin’ know he made my life hell and—”

“From what I understand, he kept you from getting arrested, Brother,” Al said in the measured and calm way that meant he was losing his patience with Ed; but that was okay because Ed was losing his patience with Al. Al continued talking as Ed debated packing up and leaving even though they hadn’t gotten anything done. “Whether or not magic is real, he sounds like a decent person.”

“He’s a pompous prick.”

“You’re just being stubborn.”

“Am not.”

“Are too!”

“Am _not!!_ ” It was not lost on Ed that they sounded like preschoolers arguing and the embarrassed color rising in Al’s cheeks as he glanced around at the other patrons meant it hadn't escaped his notice either. Al huffed out of his nose and forced himself to remain silent. Ed started gathering up his things—he was feeling that distinct mix of righteous anger and years-worn guilt that often blossomed into stupid, hurtful words and he knew from experience that it was time for a bit of space. “Fine, whatever. I’m gunna get some air. Don’t fucking go to his class, it’ll only rot your brain.”

“I’m an adult, Brother,” Al said frostily, but then he melted just a smidge. “But if it really means that much to you, I won’t.”

Guilt swallowed Ed whole, but he kept shoving his belongings into his bag. He hoisted it onto his good shoulder as he slid out of the booth. “Thanks.”

As Ed stomped out of the cafe, the sound of grinding coffee beans and jabbering students drowned out the sound of Al’s coughing.

—

Roy regretted volunteering to teach an early morning class. He’d done it before and he’d hated it just as much then as he did now. Dragging his ass in front of equally disgruntled students to teach a subject they took because the only magic they knew was explosive, showy, awe-inspiring and they desired that power for themselves. They would soon find out there was no way to learn magic if they didn’t already have an inclination towards it and hopefully the mass of students he had now would trickle down to a more manageable bunch. The early hour was made worse by the unfortunate altercation he’d had with the Elrics just minutes before. He yawned, swallowed half the contents of his cup of coffee and waited for the rest of his students to wander in.

Which they did, slumping into seats until the large room was mostly full. Within Central, Roy held a reputation as one of the best magic users around and any class he instructed as a guest lecturer filled to capacity within a day of opening. It was only the earliness of the hour that left most of them unenthusiastic.

The door closed behind one last straggler, light glinting off his shock of golden hair as he hurried to a shadowed corner in the back. Roy decided to ignore the last-minute addition and placed his empty cup onto the podium. He raised his hands and said, “Good morning and welcome to our second titillating day of _Concepts of Magic_ ; I am sure you are just as enthused as I am to be here at such an early hour, so let us begin.”

Roy snapped his bare fingers and flames flashed to life, flickering erratically over the tattoo inked in black across the back of his hand; they kissed his skin like moth wings as he fed them oxygen, willing them larger and brighter beneath the dimmed fluorescent lighting. His students _oooh’d_ their hushed awe, growing louder as the fire engulfed the entirety of his hand. Roy urged the flames to slide to his other hand as he began to lecture, happy in the knowledge that all backs were straight and all eyes were on him.

“Let us start with the basics as we never had the chance last week. Who can tell me some of the differences between alchemy and magic?”

A young girl towards the back raised her hand and he gestured for her to answer. “Well, magic doesn’t require transmutation circles, right? And it can make stuff...er...different than how it started? Like, say, a wooden boat into a metal chair, right?”

“Mostly correct. Magic users still have to follow the law of conservation of mass, however. You simply cannot create something from nothing, no matter how flexible the power you start with is. What else?”

Low murmuring as students turned to each other to soundboard guesses, but when a minute passed and no one else ventured to raise their hand, Roy continued. “Ah, very well, it is rather early to pick your brains. Let us start with their sources. Alchemy, as we practice it here in Amestris, pulls its power from the movements of tectonic plates. This has been proven time and again as science has advanced and is now commonly taken as fact. In contrast, a popular _theory_ is that magic pulls power from geographic alignments called ley lines. There is nothing to link magic to tectonic movements, but maybe—like alkahestry—we pull from multiple sources of energy. Large displays of magic are also far more draining on one’s physical strength than similar displays of alchemy, which leads many to believe that some of that energy resides within your body as well. This is further proven by emotional flare-ups, one of the biggest sources of strife I have had to deal with on the job—”

“Sir, sorry, but—Professor Edward says that magic isn’t real.” A student near the front burst out, turning red when Roy focused his attention on him, eyebrow raised. He cowered a bit in his seat, slumping as if he wished to keep shrinking into himself until he disappeared. “He says that ley lines are—” he darkened to the color of one of Maes’ horrible magenta shirts and muttered, “—bullshit.”

Roy couldn’t help it, he snorted. Edward couldn’t have been teaching more than a couple of semesters and he’d already gained a follower. “I am well aware of Elric’s standing on magic. But as I practice magic daily, I am disinclined to agree with him. Except for ley lines. He certainly has every right to disparage the science around those. Now, if I may continue—”

“But Professor Edward is brilliant,” the same student insisted, tapping his knees in his agitation. Had this kid been in the first class? Was Edward really a professor? And what was with that level of familiarity? “His alchemy is, like, absurdly powerful and he knows the composition of everything and he says Mages are just alchemists who need to be the center of attention.”

“That certainly sounds like Edward,” Roy muttered under his breath, well aware of his own penchant for performance and flash. Louder, he said, “I am not doubting Elric’s abilities as an alchemist and as a scientist I would argue he is unparalleled—but please, for the love of all that is holy, never tell him I said that, I will never hear the end of it—” a few students giggled. “—but, where magic is concerned, I would rather trust my own experiences and studies. As you are so familiar with Elric, can I assume you have taken a course by him?”

The kid turned impossibly redder, so much blood flushing his cheeks Roy worried he might start _leaking_. He nodded.

“Naturally. And what is your name?”  

“Kevin Stenson.”

“Very good. Mr. Stenson, I am going to let you in on a secret. I am not qualified to teach this course—I am not an academic, I am an officer of the law. Elric, on the other hand, has dedicated his life to studying alchemy, as far as I can tell, and when it comes to breaking down the science he will undoubtedly speak circles around me. He knows alchemy. However, I am a nationally recognized State Mage and I have spent my life honing the skills that have earned me that recognition. In my line of work I have seen the intimate differences between magic users and alchemists at work. If you truly do not believe in magic, that is your prerogative—there are many who share that view with you. Having said that, it does beg the question as to why you would waste your valuable time on a class such as mine.”

Stenson didn’t respond, head tilted down to stare at his knees. Roy gave a small nod—he should probably not be satisfied with tearing a kid down, but he was still on edge after his argument with Edward and his patience had taken a blow, thinning beyond bearable levels. “I am not going to tell you that you must drop the class. It would be my pleasure to offer you an opposing argument to your current beliefs, if you are open minded enough to listen. But if you are unwilling to do that, I cannot imagine you will receive any benefit from remaining here.”

“Now—” Roy brought his hands together in a clap, but stopped before they could connect, surprised by the flames still snaking and curling around his fingers. No wonder Stenson had lapsed into such complete silence instead of pushing back. Roy snapped his fingers, banishing the flames and smiled widely at the class to hide how disconcerted he was at having forgotten his own magic. “—now, if I could continue? Yes? Wonderful. Where were we? Oh, yes, emotional flare-ups—”

The rest of the class continued smoothly, Roy speaking on autopilot as he let his mind wander aimlessly. He’d stretched himself too thin, taking this slot this quarter. What good would it really do, teaching once a week on a campus far too large to really keep a proper eye on? Central University was the largest university in Amestris, lodging an intimidating number of students: any one of whom could present at any moment. A herculean task, trying to keep an eye on all of them.

“Alright, let us finish here for today. No homework, I am sure you will soon be drowning in assignments from your other classes. We will start discussing content in the next lecture, so please be sure to purchase a copy of _Magic: Myths and More_ and have a look through the first chapter before then. Dismissed.”

He turned back to his podium, glaring balefully at his empty coffee cup. He was expected at the office in an hour, surely he had time to grab another cup from Central Perk on his way out? Even if he was late, it would certainly be worth the scolding to avoid the sludge the break room wrongfully proclaimed as coffee. It would even be worth another run in with Edward. Decided, he snatched up his bag and crumpled the empty cup with his free hand, hoping no one hung behind for questions today.

“Mage Mustang?”  

There was that hope dashed against the floor. Roy mustered up a friendly smile for whichever sweet-voiced student had approached him.

“Ah, Alphonse.” Roy blinked slowly and did not drop the smile. This was not the Elric Roy had expected when he caught that initial flash of gold. Alphonse smiled back at him, but it was a nervous thing, highlighted by the way he pulled at the sleeve of his jumper. He glanced over his shoulder, watching as the last students disappeared from the room and then turned his attention back on Roy, looking slightly more resolute.

“It seems Brother causes you trouble even when he’s not around. I’m pretty positive he wouldn’t want that kid representing him, though.” Alphonse said it with a breath of disdain despite his smile and Roy coughed into his fist to hide a surprised snort of laughter. “Your lecture was very interesting, by the way. I apologize for intruding on it.”

“Not at all.” What a strangely polite and sharp-edged young man. If it weren’t for the coloring, Roy never would’ve believed Alphonse was related to the caustic Edward Elric. “What can I do for you?”

Alphonse chewed on his lip, slipping right back into an uncertain stance and it left him looking young. “I know you don’t know me and you certainly don’t owe me anything at all. If anything, I should repay you for all the trouble you’ve kept Edward out of—”

Roy interrupted before Alphonse could continue, his curiosity getting the better of him. “I really do not think I kept Edward out of any trouble at all. I am surprised anything Edward would have told you gave the impression that I had. We have rarely ever seen eye to eye and he does not speak kindly of me.”

Alphonse grinned. “I can read between the lines, Mage Mustang. He respects you.”  

“And his disdain for my magic is just for show?”

“No, that’s for real.” Alphonse’s smile dimmed and he started fidgeting again. “And also why I’m here. Brother and I have been researching something and we've both run up against a roadblock. He’s determined to continue along his path, but I think that maybe it’s time to try something new.”

“What do you need from me?” There was definitely more to it than that, but Alphonse still fidgeted nervously enough that Roy didn’t want to press for more information just yet.

“I need someone with magical knowledge to point me in the right direction. My preliminary research hasn’t been very helpful. Unlike medicine or alchemy, the science behind magic is almost nonexistent and the internet is rather useless. But I have to at least explore this avenue, it’s the last one left open to us.”

“I believe Edward would kill me if I were to provide you with assistance.” Which was not by any means a _no_ on Roy’s part but he wasn’t exactly exaggerating, either. Edward wouldn’t just kill Roy, Edward would maim him first and then bring a building down upon him to watch him bleed out and suffocate beneath the rubble. Roy’s phone buzzed in his pocket, but he ignored it for the moment, observing Alphonse.  

“He might, sir, and me along with you,” Alphonse agreed after a moment of thought. “However, I’m tired of watching my brother tear himself apart to try and fix me. If there’s any chance that magic holds an answer, I want to find out. Maybe if I had evidence contrary to his thinking, Brother would change his mind.”

“Why would you come to the one person your brother hates for that assistance?” Roy doubted anything would sway Edward from his opinions on magic, let alone evidence Roy helped gather, but Alphonse apparently thought differently; and that slip, that _fix me_ nestled between his previous statement gave Roy all the information he needed. Their research had something to do with Alphonse’s poor health.

Alphonse shrugged in answer, the movement bringing attention to his too-sharp shoulders. Roy’s phone stopped buzzing against his thigh. “I already told you what I think about Brother’s true feelings. But even if that weren’t the case, my friend Ling suggested I talk with you if I ever had the opportunity.”

“That would be Ling Yao, I assume.” Alphonse nodded and Roy couldn’t help the slight twitch of his eye. Edward’s relationship with Yao was what first drew Roy’s attention to Edward after their initial clash—Yao didn’t mess about with uninteresting people. Roy’s phone buzzed again and Roy smiled an apology at Alphonse as he tugged it out of his pocket. “I need to take this, should not be but a moment.”

The phone buzzing in his hand was an outdated monstrosity, complete with sticking buttons and barely reliable internet search capabilities; it was, unfortunately, the most updated piece of technology he could coax into working when exposed to his magic. He answered with a click, stepping away from Alphonse. “Detective Mustang.”

 _“Yo, Boss, you still on campus?”_ Havoc’s Eastern drawl crackled over the line indicating that residual energy from Roy’s earlier display still hung around and hampered the connection.

“I am. I was just about to head into the office.”

 _“Uh-huh. Can ya hurry?_   _I know you got like another half hour before you gotta come in, but we got wind of another disappearance and it seems like a thing you’d wunna look at.”_

“I will be there in ten minutes.” Roy said already heading towards the door. He stopped just as quickly, remembering Alphonse—he ought to at least say his farewells.

_“Sounds good, just don’t kill anyone. Your driving’s shit when you’re in a hurry.”_

Roy bristled. “I am an _excellent_ driver.”

_“Keep telling yourself that. Anyway, Heymans’ll fill ya in when ya get here.”_

“You should not speak to your boss like that. I am nothing if not the embodiment of grace behind the—” the line went dead and Roy huffed. “He hung up on me.”

Alphonse raised both eyebrows at him, slender hand covering his mouth as he either suppressed a laugh or a cough. Roy grimaced and shoved his phone back into his pocket.  “I really should not be so lenient with my team, I have only allowed insubordination to flourish. Soon they will not even show up to the office and then where will I be?”

“I think it just means you have a good relationship with them,” Alphonse responded as if he knew the intricate workings of Roy’s office, but he was not far off the mark. Roy had a very loyal support group, both inside and outside of the precinct and cheek was an easy price to pay for that. Alphonse started fidgeting again and Roy remembered the original request with a little jolt of anxiety. Walking towards the exit he answered.

“I have to go, but if it is only a bit of prodding you need, I will see what I can do when I am free. Here is my card, I recommend e-mailing, as magic tends to interfere with calls and texts to my phone. Alternatively you can try catching me after my next lecture.”

“I appreciate it.” Alphonse said stepping through the entrance after Roy. “I’m sorry for keeping you.”

“It was no trouble at all,” Roy said but he didn’t really believe it; he would hate to cause any undue stress to this young man. Yet, in his experience, anytime magic and an Elric mixed, nothing ever went well. Roy offered a crooked smile. “I apologize for rushing off, but I really must be going.”

“Of course, thank you again.”

Roy nodded and then trotted off towards the staff lot thinking that if Yao sent Alphonse Roy’s way, then it would be in his best interests to pay attention.


	2. Chapter 2

Raindrops like dollops of acrylic and crystal clung to the caps of newly sprouted mushrooms. The midafternoon sun—poked through dispersing rain-gray clouds—sparkled against the water enticingly as egg-smooth heads unfurled. Ed walked passed the circle as he tried to clear his head of his argument with Al, but he had nothing to prove to the gloomy clouds and the friendly sun, so he skirted around its edge and continued on his way. Disappointed, the mushrooms collapsed inward and rotted back into the earth.

—

“I just turned my back for a moment, to grab tea.”

Roy listened carefully, elbows pressed into his knees and fingers woven beneath his chin, his face folded into an expression of sympathetic concern. Beside him, Breda scribbled notes as Shou Tucker brokenly walked them through the disappearance of his daughter, Nina.

“She loves to play outside when it’s sunny and we have such a high fence I didn’t think—she did it all the time...She didn’t scream, she didn’t…” He took a deep, shuddering breath and rubbed the heels of his hands into his reddened eyes in an effort to center himself; it knocked his glasses askew and tangled the wire nose pieces into his short fringe.

“Mr. Tucker,” Roy said softly after a long, silent moment. Breda reached for the coffee offered to them when they had first arrived, tapping his pen with his other hand against the notebook balanced on his knee. Sharp eyes glanced around the room, taking in every detail of their setting while Roy did the same with their interviewee. Mr. Tucker slowly dragged his hands away from his face and took another fortifying breath. Roy continued, “I apologize for putting you through a second round of questioning, I can only imagine how—”

Mr. Tucker waved him off, straightening up with an effort and a shaky half-smile. “If it’ll help bring Nina back to me, I’ll answer questions until I lose my voice. She’s all I have after her mother left. Anything I can do to help, please let me know.”

“That is very helpful of you,” Roy said, feeling a little ill at ease but uncertain why. “I only have a few questions and then I would like for you to show me to the yard where you last saw Nina.”

“Of course, of course.”

“We do not have any records indicating that Nina was magical. Is that accurate?”  

Tucker tilted his head to the side. “No, I don’t believe it is. She hadn’t said anything yet, but I’ve noticed an abundance of flowers lately in places she likes to play. I didn’t pry because it seemed like she was trying to hide it from me, like a surprise. She was so sweet, always thinking of what she could do to make her daddy happy.”

Roy fought the urge to grimace even as his stomach tightened uncomfortably around that bit of knowledge. If she had magic...but that’s why this case was thrown his way in the first place. “I see.”

“But really, it could just have been wishful thinking on my part. Flowers are hardly rare, but it seems like State Mages live wonderful lives and if she has magic she could easily apply for the position. I never really amounted to much and my dabbling in alchemy has largely been fruitless.”

“State Mages are combatants, just like State Alchemists. The position is hardly cushy.” Roy grit his teeth when Breda tapped his pad particularly loudly, throwing an exasperated look Roy’s way. _Your bias is showing_ , it said and Roy reined himself back in. “Of course, private mages also do well for themselves, so it is not uncommon for parents to hope their children possess an inclination for magic. Have you noticed anything else strange around her?”

“Not at all. She’s perfect.”

“In that case—” Roy stood up, positive he would get nowhere with further questions. Breda followed suit. “—can you please show us the yard? I would like to look around the area she disappeared from, if possible.”

“Of course.” Tucker stood and then beckoned the two of them to follow him to the back of the house. “She spent hours back here, usually with Alexander.”

“Alexander?” Breda asked.

“Yes, our dog. He’s rather hard to miss, usually, but ever since Nina disappeared I’m afraid he won’t leave the yard. His howling is what caught my attention when she—it was as if he was crying. I’ve never heard him make a noise like that before. Well, it’s through here.”

Tucker pushed open the back door and gestured out into the yard. It wasn’t very large, made to look even smaller with the mass of white fur spread out despondently on the ground. A water and food bowl lay beside him, barely touched.

“Why don’t I wait here?” Breda choked out, eyes trained wide and unblinking on Alexander. If the situation weren’t so sad, Roy would laugh at Breda’s absurd fear. As it was, his own eyes had found a growth of white flowers nearly hidden by Alexander’s head.

Carefully, voice level and reassuring even as his skin crawled with sudden anxiety, Roy asked, “Have those always been there?”

“Have what?”  

“Those flowers, the cyclamens.”

“Oh, you know what they are? I’ve never seen them before—so pretty, just like my Nina. Alexander won’t leave them alone. I think they remind him of her too.”

Roy allowed his face to go blank when Tucker’s back was turned, the closest to dropping his mask he could afford while on the job. Breda frowned at him in question but Roy gave a little shake of his head, brushing off the concern. With an effort he approached the vibrant growth of white flowers, shivering at the caress of fading magic.

“They are beautiful,” Roy finally murmured, bending down to run a finger across the blade of a petal. Alexander whined, shifting his large head so that he could stare balefully up at Roy. Roy stroked a pale and tattooed hand against his fur absently as he breathed in the lingering scent of blackberry flowers and summer. That was the last piece he needed to confirm his suspicions; this had to be the work of the fae. And if that were the case, there was nothing he could do. Nina would become nothing more than a dusty folder, a case gone cold. Roy stood and made a slow, regulated circuit around the yard before coming to a stop back at the house.

“Did you find anything?” Tucker asked hopefully but Roy shook his head.

“I am afraid not. However, with the aid of your descriptions and the photographs you gave the police, we have solid groundwork for our search. We will be sure to contact you if there are further developments. I apologize for taking up so much of your time.”

“Not at all. I appreciate all of your hard work, Detective. I know you will do everything you can to bring my Nina back to me.”

“Of course.” Roy smiled even as his stomach curdled, sour with a knowledge he couldn’t share. Afterall, no matter how much magic existed on display in the world, no one truly believed in faeries.

— 

Magic brushed across Ling’s skin like the caress of something half-wild and he froze, thin hands digging into the grass he sat on. Around him, students milled about in the sun as it slowly appeared from behind its curtain of clouds; only half of them sported jackets, the other half went without in a stubborn attempt to hold onto the last vestiges of summer.

“Again?” Lan Fan asked, rubbing her hands against her arms as if to ward off the cold. She fixed Ling with sharp, questioning eyes. “What do you think it is?”

“Nothing good,” Ling muttered after a moment. Against Ling’s perception, the magic warmed his skin as if it’d been kissed by summer and nostalgia, thrumming with the sudden flare and dissipation of foreign energy. To feel that twice in one morning now had him on high alert. He glanced quickly around the lawn for the source and his eyes caught on a flash of gold; a ribbon of familiar hair attached to an even more familiar young alchemist flickered right where Ling estimated the magic signature to have originated from. Ling inhaled, prepared to call out to Edward, but something in the hunch of his shoulders and weight of his step stopped Ling before he could even exhale the first syllable.

“Oh, it’s Ed.” Lan Fan tilted her head to the side as she joined Ling in watching Ed’s march across the campus lawn as he headed who-knew-where at a whirlwind pace. “He seems upset.”

“That he does.” Ling frowned. “He wasn’t earlier, was he? I’m going to keep an eye on him.”

Lan Fan huffed. “You say that like you weren’t already stalking him.”

“I’m not stalking him!” Ling exclaimed in dramatic indignation. “Besides, he’s used to it. I’ve been following him around for ages.”

“How you’ve survived harassing him, I will never know.”

“Well, the sex—”

“— _was electric, out of this world, an experience to be immortalized by the poets_ ,” Lan Fan quoted at him, deadpan. Ling grinned at her, batting his lashes excessively until she snorted and tried to hide her own grin. “So you’ve said, and maybe that worked while you were dating but that doesn’t explain _now_. One day soon he’s going to transmute you into a coffee mug just for being annoying.”

“I’m Alphonse approved, he’d never transmute me into something so common.” Speaking of the younger brother, Ling would have to detour from his mission to check in on him as well. Lately, Al’s sudden decline in health had everyone who knew him on edge with bitter anticipation; between the two brothers and the weird burst of magic around Central, Ling found his hands growing full.

“You’re right, it’d be something garish and useless like a gargoyle.” She pushed herself up from the ground and held her hand out to him. He accepted it and she tugged him to his feet. “Let’s get moving before we lose track of Ed.”

“Now you’re talking.”

—

“What will we do about the Nina case?” Breda asked when they finally returned to the office. Ross and Havoc looked up from their desks at the question and Roy realized that Breda had held off asking in the car so that Roy wouldn’t have to repeat himself.

Roy took a moment to gather his thoughts; he needed to remain impartial, collected—the vines of memory wrapping around those thoughts made that difficult.

“Unofficially, this is a cold case,” Roy replied eventually, unable to keep the bitterness from his voice. He fell into his chair, resting his elbows against his desk. “Officially, we do everything by the book. We interview neighbors, check at her school. There is no evidence of foul play, so likely this will be classified as a runaway situation.”

“What makes ya so sure, Boss?” Havoc asked, like he did every time Roy made this announcement. Of the four people in the office, he remained the most sceptical of the fae and Roy didn’t blame him; if not for his history, Roy wouldn’t believe in them either.

“There were flowers growing where Nina liked to play and the father doesn’t remember them being there before. White cyclamens, right?” Breda answered looking to Roy for confirmation and Roy nodded; Ross grimaced, understanding immediately but Havoc scrunched up his nose, grinding his unlit cigarette between his teeth as he thought that over.

“What do those mean again?”

“Farewell and I think death, because they’re poisonous,” Ross chimed in, tapping her chin thoughtfully. Maria Ross was the newest member of their team, with them only half a year. She had come highly recommended by Maes; her analytical mind balanced well with a healthy dose of empathy that the other three didn’t necessarily lack, but also didn’t have in abundance. “With her age, the white could possibly be purity or innocence?”

“I am glad someone did the assigned reading,” Roy sighed and joined his fingers together to avoid snapping them. “Either way, we will not half-ass the search. I have not been wrong before, but I would rather have all our bases covered just in case I am. Ross, I would like you to conduct interviews at the school. Breda, if you could continue the investigation in the Tuckers’ neighborhood?”

They both answered in the affirmative.

“And me, Boss?” Havoc asked, pointing to himself.

“I need to pick your brain about Mauro.”

Havoc frowned around his cigarette. “What of him?”

“Would he be willing to meet me?”

“He’s cagey as fuck, you know. Dunno if he would, why?”

“I have taken on a bit of a pet project and could use his medical knowledge.”

“Gunna need more’n that, Boss.”

“I do not have more than that at the moment, but when I do, I will fill you in. Will you talk to him?”

“Yeah, sure, but at least lemme know what the project is.”

Roy resisted the urge to chew on his lip as he debated his answer. He decided on honesty. “Edward Elric’s younger brother approached me today. He requested my assistance researching healing magic.”  

“Oh boy,” Havoc muttered while Breda gave a low whistle.

“I’ve heard his name before,” Ross said, head tilted to the side. “But I think I’m missing context.”

“Edward Elric, alchemist extraordinaire,” Havoc said with a funny little grin. “He has it out for the Boss—thinks he’s some sorta quack. Boss thinks he’s got a nice ass.”

Roy’s fingers smoked as he pinched the bridge of his nose, contemplating setting Havoc’s desk on fire. Breda took over before Roy could. “Kid kept getting processed through us before we cobbled together this unit. He did a lot of stupid things for money. Mainly, however, he kept getting pegged for practicing commercial alchemy without a license.”

“Usually without charging at all. Ed thinks alchemy should be used for the people and only asks for what people can afford. And Boss, being the softy he is, kept getting Ed off those charges ‘cause they were bullshit. But boy, if you coulda seen 'em—they were always at each other’s throats, like some fuckin’ married couple.”

“This is all beside the point,” Roy finally interceded before his men could continue making a fool of him. Ross had her eyes opened wide as she took all of this information in.

“You’re right, Boss, the point is—you’ve got a damn death wish if you’re helping Ed’s brother with magic.”

“Why?” Ross again.

“Remember that thing about him thinking Boss is a quack? Ed thinks all magic is bullshit tricks or fancy-ass alchemy and that State Mages are just in it for the glory of a Title. He doesn’t think much of State Alchemists either, for that matter.”

“He sounds like a brat,” Ross said simply and Breda snorted.

“Well, yeah. But he’s our brat,” Havoc shot back, reminding Roy that Havoc and Edward actually got on quite well. Havoc was known to be rather protective of Edward—they all were; he had a good heart underneath his bloody-minded, mouthy exterior. Havoc pointed a finger at Roy. “And I repeat. Death wish. But if you’re willing to tread on that ground, I’m gunna guess it’s important. I’ll talk to Doctor Mauro.”

“Thank you.” Roy said with a forced smile. “I appreciate it.”

“Good. Now, it’s late, tomorrow’ll be early. Let’s go home.”

Havoc kicked away from his desk and jumped up. Ross stared at him as if he'd grown a second head.

"Havoc, it's not even five." She pointed to the wall clock to prove her point but Havoc shrugged.

"Yeah, well Heyman's an' I've got a hot date with a smokin' military babe an' I wunna look my best.That takes time." He favored Ross with a cheeky wink.

"You still have paperwork to finish up on our last case and we're not meeting Becca until nine," Breda said as he opened his laptop and settled in to work. Havoc shot him a look so utterly betrayed that Roy's lips twitched around a weak, honest smile. Leave it to his men to inject a glimmer of something bright when he found himself near to drowning in the dark.

"You can leave as soon as you finish—" Roy said and Havoc brightened instantly, "— _if_ you promise to try to contact Doctor Mauro as soon as you can."

"Yeah, of course! You're the best, Boss!"

At least someone would leave the office in high spirits tonight.

—

As often happened, Ed found himself in the library after his class, nearly buried in alchemy and alkahestry textbooks. He had torn through most of them already, between his research to cure Al and his—selfish, indulgent—research for his course _Advanced Alchemic Array Construction_ ; a few texts he had initially rejected as useless to Al now graced the pile as well. In his desperation, he would look _anywhere_.

 _Not anywhere,_ the voice constantly whispering at the back of his skull reminded him. Ed scowled at _Alchemy Through the Ages_ , his concentration shot. He hadn’t had much to begin with, an unfortunate side effect of arguing with his brother. So he stood and stretched, his automail ports twinging slightly as if he hadn’t moved for quite some time.

“Ed!”

Ed didn’t pause to look up at the sound of his name, immediately turning on his heel to his left, slipping down an aisle of bookshelves. He fought the urge to sprint to avoid the owner of that voice as he hastily attempted to lose himself in the vast expanse of the library. He turned right at another break in the shelves and ran smack into the broad chest of Ling Yao: continual thorn in his side. “Fuck.”

“Ed, Ed, Ed, really now,” Ling chirped, sliding an arm around Ed’s shoulders. “Is that any way to greet your buddy after we’ve been parted for so long?”  

“I saw you this morning,” Ed snapped, trying to duck out of the hold Ling had on him. Ling just followed along with him, slippery and tenacious as an octopus. “—when you were stealing all my fuckin’ food from my fuckin’ fridge. And how the fuck do ya keep getting in, anyway? You ain’t an alchemist and neither’s Lan Fan. I got traps on the windows.”

“Ed, we’re in a public establishment, mind your tongue.” Ling cheerfully tried to direct them out of the library and towards the tinted, wide-windowed automatic doors of the entrance, but Ed tugged a bit more forcefully and managed to detour them long enough so that he could grab his things; the textbooks were abandoned to the librarians, their pages hadn’t helped him anyway. Ling continued talking as they circled back to the entrance. “I have my ways—” He gave a sultry wink and Ed rolled his eyes.“—Secret ways.”

“Bullshit.” A few students mingled around the foyer but Ed expected to see more of them this early in the afternoon.

“Not true! I still have a key—oh wait, telling you means it’s not a secret anymore. Damn.”

“You fuckin’ _what_?” Ed struggled, elbowing Ling with his automail arm hard enough to force him to let go. Ling wheezed out a pained breath, but danced away when Ed pulled back his hand to smack him. “Give it back, you mooch. You don’t need it anymore!”

“I’m wounded. After all the effort I go through to check on your brother when you’re here teaching and researching,” Ling said, placing a hand dramatically over his heart as if shot. “Shouldn’t I at least be entitled to a key and a sandwich?”

“You don’t—!” But then Ed stopped, because Ling really _did_ go out of his way to check on Al during his bad days when Ed had to be at the University; giving up the contents of his refrigerator to this menace and semi-permanent shadow was a small price to pay for that kindness. So Ed scowled and muttered unkind things under his breath instead. Ling laughed, skipping ahead to activate the doors and Ed followed after, startling at the bruising sky that met them; darkness had nestled in as the last of the sun slipped behind the tall rows of buildings that made up student housing—hadn’t he only been a couple hours? Ed directed his irritation elsewhere. “Are you the one filling Al’s head with fantasy bullshit? He nearly collapsed my throat trying to keep me from walking into a stupid circle of mushrooms!”

Ling looked away from Ed quick enough that Ed couldn’t quite discern the strange flattening of his grin; he waved his hand at a tree and its shadow peeled away, revealing Lan Fan as she trotted over to them, dressed from neck to toe in black. Ed waved his hand in greeting and she nodded back.

“Better a collapsed throat than walking into one of those,” Ling said with solid conviction.

“It _is_ you!” Ed squawked accusingly, jabbing a finger at Ling. “Fuck off about it, he’s gettin’ scared over nothin’!”

“It is not nothing!” Ling snapped and Ed’s mouth clicked shut. Ling sighed heavily through his nose, scrubbing a hand over his face. “I don’t know how you can remain so stubbornly narrow-minded when you do magic every day!”

“I do alchemy, you moron. I’m an alchemist, not a fucking wannabe magician—and they ain’t even doin’ magic, they’re just—”

“Speaking of food!” Ling interrupted, throwing his hands out, smiling again. Ed narrowed his eyes at him, thrown for a loop over the sudden change in demeanor. “I want some and I need your ID to get a discount at that place near your apartment.” Ling linked his arm around Ed’s automail one and marched them down the wide sidewalk that ran alongside the main library. “Al’s already there. He told me I should come get you since you weren’t answering your phone—not that you ever do—and he’s too tired to come here and drag your ass back to reality.”

Ed slumped as his energy drained to make space for more guilt. Ling let him mope for a grand total of twenty seconds before adding, “And he said don’t feel guilty, you idiot. Just come eat.” 

—

    From: Alphonse Elric  
  
    To:  Roy Mustang  
  
    Date:  Tue, Oct 10, 20— at 18:33  
  
    Subject:  Requesting your assistance with private project

Dear Mage Mustang,

I hope this email finds you well.

I apologize for practically ambushing you after your lecture today with regards to assisting me. I realize it was rather sudden but after meeting you at Central Perk, it seemed the perfect time. I would sincerely appreciate any and all assistance you are willing to provide me with. I really have no idea where to start searching at this time.

Sincerely,

Alphonse Elric

—

The pub was mostly empty, so finding Al was just a matter of of walking through the entrance and turning right. He sat at a table for four, his water glass ringed in condensation that slowly crept across the surface and his thumbs quickly pressed out a message on his bulky phone. Ed dropped into the seat across from him, but he didn’t look up from the screen of his phone even as Lan Fan and Ling followed suit.

“Do you think he knows we’re here?” Lan Fan asked when a long moment passed and Al still hadn’t looked up.

“You know, he made fun of me today for not paying attention to my surroundings and yet here he is, not paying attention to his surroundings.”

“You _don’t_ pay attention to your surroundings,” Lan Fan said and Ed stuck his tongue out at her.

Ling reached across the table to snatch the phone from Al’s hands, laughing loudly when Al yelped, knocking over his water as he scrabbled to grab it. “Give it back!”

“Pay attention to us.” Ling said, but his own eyes were glued to whatever Al had been writing, a thin brow quirking slightly. Ed glanced to the side, his own curiosity getting the better of him, but Ling had the small screen tilted in a way that made it impossible for Ed to see it.

Al blinked as he realized there were other people at the table with him. Slowly he slid back into his seat, cheeks flushing. “Ah, hello.”

“Hello, hypocrite,” Ed said and Al’s cheeks glowed impossibly redder. “Ling said you were feeling shitty, why didn’t you go home?”

“I thought it might be nice to eat out together.” It felt like a truce, the sideways smile tentative and nearly-gold eyes soft. “It’s certainly easier.”

“Sure fuckin’ is.” Ed smiled back. “But you’re going straight to bed when we get back to the apartment.”

“Yes, mom.”

Ling tossed Al back his phone and Ed missed the quick exchange of looks, one questioning and the other guilty. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay! I noticed a bit of a time continuity error and ended up adding a lot of extra content, so yay?? This is a bridging chapter, things start to happen really quickly in a couple of chapters! Once again I have to seriously scream my thanks at Kat who is literally like 90% of the reason I can even consider posting and a very warm thank you to [Cade](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12258003/chapters/27855387) for checking this out beforehand as well!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to take a moment to underscore that this fic is tagged dark for a reason. That doesn't apply to this chapter, but I feel in general I should reiterate. Just in case.
> 
> Once again, and as always, a major fuckin' thank you to Kat for all of her fantastic editing and cheerleading!

_The sky melted lavender and mulberry, cracked through by the spindled boughs of bare branches. Sweet air pulsed warm with summer and blackberry flowers. The ground soaked cold through his shoes._

_A creature knelt there, skin crisp and oozing around burns too serious to heal. Roy lifted a hand, pressed two fingers together, snapped before it could even lift its head to beg._

_The bruised sky drowned in a wash of angry flame, cold ground scorched black and free of life. The smell of blackberry flowers slid down his throat on the trail of hot grease, coating his tongue._

_“Perfect.” Hands slid across his waist, a chin nestled against his shoulder. “Beautiful, my Salamander.”_

_The thrill of a job well done haunted him worse than the smell._

Roy jolted awake with a shuddering gasp.

His hands hurt, and when he managed to look down his sides, he found them gripped so tightly into his sheets he'd nearly tore them. Anxiety sped up his heart like a shot of adrenaline slipped between one breath and the next. He groaned, more to clear the ache from his throat than out of any real frustration. The old alarm clock on his bedside table pointed at just before four in the morning. Roy cursed silently at his ceiling, forcing his fingers to release the sheets. Tiny holes, like cigarette burns, spotted the cloth where he’d gripped it and Roy cursed again. He would not return to sleep.

As Roy tried to calm his breathing, the whiskey pushed beneath his bathroom sink called out to him, a silent promise to dull the edges of his day. He resisted, sliding his legs over the side of his bed, and padded downstairs, phone in hand. He considered coffee instead of the whiskey, but that would only make the anxiety worse.

Tea, then.

He responded to Alphonse as the water boiled, saving the twenty odd photos of Elicia that Maes had texted him at just past three. They just missed each other as usual; Maes never slept, Roy always dreamed.

—

    From: Roy Mustang  
  
    To:  Alphonse Elric  
  
    Date:  Sat, Oct 14, 20— at 4:23  
  
    Subject: Re: Requesting your assistance with private project

Alphonse,

I am not sure I will be of much assistance. However, if you could provide me with a little more information about your situation, maybe I can direct you toward a helpful text.  
  
To get you started, I do suggest reading _Magic: Myths and More_ by Berthold Hawkeye. It is the text I have assigned my students. He was a bit of an eccentric, but well versed in the ways of magic. Anything by Clara Psiren is a wonderful resource on healing magic. However, you might be better served simply cornering a potential healer in the Medical Department, like you did with me. They will have more practical knowledge.

Roy Mustang (Det.)

Civilian State Mage

Central City Police Department: Magic Division

—

Al snorted loud enough that Ed looked up from the stove to stare at him. Al just shook his head, closing his laptop.

“What?” Ed asked, curious despite himself.

“Nothing, I just asked a classmate if he’d lend me his notes.” Al slid the clunky computer back into its bag and then leaned against the table, one arm folded for balance and the other supporting his head. “He obliged but missed a vital section I need for that quiz.”

“Fuckin' helpful.” Ed swiped his spatula through the scrambled eggs in the pan, stirring them one last time before dividing them between two plates. “Let’s eat.”

—

    From: Alphonse Elric  
  
    To:  Roy Mustang  
  
    Date:  Sat, Oct 14, 20— at 10:02  
  
    Subject: Re: Re: Requesting your assistance with private project

Dear Mage Mustang,

Good morning!

I appreciate your suggestions and if I’m able to, I promise I’ll also ambush a healer. However, I wouldn’t know who to corner, at least you came recommended.

So, for full transparency: like my brother, I’m a bit skeptical of magic in general, but unlike him I can’t dismiss it out of hand. I’m not as accomplished an alchemist as him, but I’m well read on the subject and it’s difficult for me to wrap my head around a 'science' (i.e. magic) that doesn’t seem to follow any scientific laws aside from the conservation of mass, as you mentioned in your lecture. You also mentioned ley lines, but what I can find on them is spotty at best.

However, that fire display in your lecture was particularly intriguing. I noticed you have something like a transmutation circle tattooed to the back of your hand, but I can’t work out how you could create flames just by snapping your fingers, even with the circle’s assistance. I’m curious what you could tell me about the basics of magic (and how something like that is possible).

Sincerely,

Alphonse

—

Ling sat himself on the windowsill, palm spread across the tiny touch-activated array carved into the wood. The Elric brothers had a first floor apartment, leaving little challenge for Ling to enter it, but he also knew all of Ed’s tricks and this particular array had no affect on him, so maybe that gave him an edge.

“Do you think Edward’s home?” Lan Fan asked from where she stood at his back. “It’s rather early and I only feel one presence.”

“He’s already at school,” Ling replied, crossing his arms over his knees as he slouched forward. “He teaches a morning class on Thursdays and Al had another bad night, so Ed probably snuck out to make sure Al didn’t wake up.”

“But _you’re_ going to wake him?”

“Nope, I’m going to raid the fridge and _wait_ for him to wake up.”

Lan Fan sighed and then pushed at Ling’s back, forcing him the rest of the way into the apartment so that she could hop over the sill after him, careful to avoid the array. Ling obliged, landing lightly from the high window into the living area. It was a small space cluttered with books and a large, lumpy couch covered in blankets took up half of the space. Ling had found Al curled up and pale on that couch far too many times since Al’d moved up from Resembool to join Ed. Ling didn’t have much to go on, but it seemed to him that Al’s condition had started to deteriorate as soon as he stepped into Central, his bad days growing common over the span of a year.

Ling crept into the small kitchen and found it still warm with the scent of fresh coffee, but the lack of accompanying food-smells left him sure that Ed departed without eating. Never a good sign.

Ling helped himself to some of the remaining coffee as Lan Fan pulled open the fridge; she snorted at something she found inside.

“What?”

“I think he knew you were coming,” she whispered, pulling out a sandwich with a sticky note attached to its saran wrap covering. _FUCKIN PAWS OFF NINJA WANNABE THIS IS FOR AL!!!_ it declared and then written in small, rushed letters underneath: _make your own, idiot, ham’ll go bad soon._

“Aw, he still cares.” Ling pressed a hand to his chest and pretended to swoon, nearly spilling his newly acquired coffee on the floor. Lan Fan rolled her eyes at him as she replaced the sandwich in her hand with a mostly spent package of sliced ham and a block of cheese.

“I thought that was obvious?” She said as she dove back into the fridge for the jar of pickle chips, which she opened and then skimmed out a few floating off the top with her fingers. “If he really wanted to keep us out, you know he could. Plus, he let you keep the key, even if you refuse to use the front door.”

“Yeah, well, it’s nice to have it affirmed.” Ling perked up as he heard Al’s bedroom door open and backpedaled so that he was standing at the mouth of the hallway. Al blinked owlishly at him, hand still on his doorknob and then groaned.

“It’s too early for this.”

“Never too early for a visit!” Ling chirped back and this time coffee did spill from his mug when he threw his arms open. Al looked down at the mess and Ling took the brief moment to scan him over. A steady loss of weight had left him nearly skeletal and standing on the other side of a bad day, his skin was sallow and bruise-dark, not just around his eyes, but where the veins tangled in his bare wrists; his golden hair seemed incapable of holding a sheen and his movements were sluggish.

“You look terrible.”

“Yes, well, dying’ll do that to you.”

“You’re not dying,” Ling pointed out, stepping aside as Al walked into the kitchen. Al scrunched his nose at Lan Fan, who had cut a large chunk from the cheese block and then wrapped pickle chips with ham around it. Lan Fan waved her free hand at him, grinning unrepentantly.

“Can’t think of any other reason I’d feel like this,” Al said, rummaging around the cupboards above the sink. He grabbed a plate and shoved it at Lan Fan, glancing purposefully down at the little yellow-green puddle of pickle juice splashed near her feet.

“I saw you reached out to Roy.”

Al stiffened and then slumped. “You suggested I approach him for help.”

“That I did.” Ling pulled out a chair from the dining room table shoved up against the wall and then pushed Al into it. The skin of his shoulder was cold where Ling’s fingers brushed it and it worried him how the life force that met his touch had weakened. “Didn’t know you’d listen to me. Have you talked to Ed?”

“You know I can’t. Not about this.” Al deflated further, folding his arms on the table so that he could drop his head against them. His voice came out muffled as he continued: “I’m only doing it because we’re coming up empty and I’m getting worse. I’ll try anything at this point.”

“He’ll find out eventually.” Lan Fan piped in; she shot a worried look at Ling over Al’s head and Ling returned it. Something niggled at the back of Ling’s mind, something that had bothered him since the day he’d met Ed nearly four years ago. The niggling had only grown worse when he finally met Al in person; probing at it frustrated him, like trying to hold onto a frog only to have it wriggle free and hop off time and again.

“Hopefully by then I’ll have something of an answer,” Al muttered. He tilted his head in his arms so that he faced Lan Fan. Ling sipped his coffee and listened. “You’ve seen how he is, he’s so darn stubborn, but right now it feels like we’re both just digging a hole and wondering why we haven’t moved forward. Gotta try something new, even if it’s pointless.”

“I don’t think it’s pointless,” Ling said and when Al flopped his head to give Ling a questioning look, Ling just shrugged. The Elric brother’s weren’t the only magic skeptics in existence, not by a long shot, but they were the only two Ling had met with genius level intellects. At least Al had started to warm up to the possibility that magic could exist, if only because desperation forced him to. “I think it’s point _ful_ —” Al snorted. “—and may turn out more fruitful than you’re expecting.”

Al nodded against his arm which pulled his face back and forth as it stuck to the bare skin. His eyes drooped. “Sure.”

“And you’re not dying.”

“Sure...” The word trailed off as Al seemed to fall asleep on the table, the bruises under his eyes more pronounced with his eyes fully hooded and his face slack. He blinked sluggishly and snuggled further into his arms.

“I’ll get him back to his room,” Lan Fan said and gently nudged Al’s shoulder until he lifted his head again. “Come on, you’ll get a crick in your neck if you stay out here. Up you get.”

“Don’ steal … n’more food...” Al slurred as he stumbled back to his feet. Lan Fan slid an arm around his shoulders and directed him back to his room even as Al continued to mumble, “...Ed’ll kill ya...”

“I can take him!” Ling flexed his arms and Al offered a disbelieving little smile. “Besides, we’re going to force him out to lunch after this, so that’s basically like paying for it.”

Alphonse gave a sleepy nod of approval as Lan Fan gently prodded him forward; Ling let his grin drop as soon as they left his line of sight. He sighed, falling into the chair Al just vacated. Lan Fan found him there, tugging at his ponytail as he lost himself in thought.

“I can’t figure it out,” Ling said after a moment. “I can’t figure _them_ out. And there’s something that needs figuring out. But I can’t. Figure. It. Out.” He punctuated the words by roughly running his fingers back and forth through the hair at his scalp, destroying the sleek line of his ponytail in the process. He groaned and slumped in his chair, frustration making him dramatic.

“Why did you send him to Roy?”

“Because Roy senses it too, that _something._ ”

“And what do you think it is?”

“I don’t _know._ ” His instincts screamed at him that what he sensed, but couldn’t peg down, would hold terrible consequences for them soon, this was normal. The urgency, however, was new, startling. He just couldn’t tell what could be the key to figuring it out: Al’s illness, Ed’s irrational stubbornness, or the golden flickers of light he only ever saw out of the corner of his eye around the brothers. “...maybe Roy will have better luck.”

“Because he’s a Mage?”

“Because he’s human.”

—

There were days that Ed regretted accepting an offer to lecture. He could hardly take care of himself and having the fates of dozens of students’ education also in his hands seemed a fucking mistake on the part of the university. He needed every scrap of free time he could horde to continue digging into the mystery of Al’s illness, but the money was too good, between the scholarship and the stipend.

 _And you enjoy it_ , a small, snide voice pointed out in the back of his head. _And that’s selfish. You’re putting yourself above your own fuckin' brother._

The words on the page blurred as Ed sunk deeper into his own head.

He could have always picked up different work. Fixing things with alchemy fetched a decent price and he knew he could complete repairs faster than any other alchemist in Central, guaranteed. He had tried, but between the expense of procuring a license to practice commercial alchemy and the sick way his stomach turned at the thought of charging people in need when alchemy was first and foremost a tool for the people—he’d given it up as a bad job.

 _And_ that treacherous voice added. _It’s boring._

Yes, teaching offered him a challenge, but teaching also allowed him access to texts he would have otherwise needed a State Alchemist’s certification to freely read, and it gave him the opportunity to interact and influence the new future of alchemists so that maybe they would make the world better.

Plus it was fun to be called professor, even if he wasn’t one officially.

Ed tried to concentrate on the stack of papers again, eyes wavering as he checked over the arrays his students had sketched. The assignment required them to create an array that could transmute safe-to-drink water from the ground with only barebones knowledge of the type of soil it resided in and then to provide a justification. He hadn’t allowed them their books, but so far most of them had sketched effective, if overly complicated, circles. Too bad Ed couldn’t concentrate long enough to write proper feedback.

His concentration never used to waver this badly, even just a year ago. Yet now, for all Al’s teasing him otherwise, he couldn’t stop himself from drowning in his own head.

The back of Ed's neck prickled and he looked up to find Lan Fan across from him. He blinked and Lan Fan blinked back at him. She had not sat there the last time he’d looked up—but if she was there that meant the presence at his back had to be Ling.

“Hey, Lan Fan,” Ed said, shuffling his students’ papers together. They needed to be easy to grab for when Ling and Lan Fan inevitably dragged him out of the library.

“Hello, Edward.”

“If I ignore him, is there any chance he’ll go away?”

“None at all.”

Hands dropped onto Ed’s shoulder. “You know better than that!”

“You don't even go here, why the fuck can't I get rid of you?”

“Is it really such a sin to check up on a friend?” Ling said, draping himself further over Ed's back.

“You’re a parasite, not a friend. Now get off, you're heavy,” Ed growled, shrugging hard enough to upset Ling's balance, but Ling just slid along Ed’s side to fall into place in the chair next to him. Ed tried to shove him off of it but Ling managed to balance the chair on one leg before falling back into place beside Ed. Fucking showoff. “What the fuck do you want?”

“I’m hungry,” Ling whined, slouching down against Ed’s side. His tone tilted sultry as he craned up again to speak into Ed’s ear. “Feed me.”

Ed’s cheeks flared with heat and fuck did he hate how easily he blushed.

“Fuck off!” Ed growled, jabbing his elbow hard into Ling’s side—it was the only method that consistently dislodged Ling and sure enough he cringed away, kicked-puppy eyes glaring at Ed. Tough shit, that only worked for Al. “Feed your own damn self.”

“You’re going to pay for Edward this time, aren’t you, Ling?”

Ed perked up at that and then immediately drooped against the table. “I really have to finish grading these. I’m behind as it is.”  
  
“Edward, I watched you glare at this page—” Lan Fan tapped a gloved finger against the top sheet of his stack. “—for twenty minutes without moving. It’s lunch time—you have to eat.”

Al was right, someone seriously could run a blade into Ed’s chest without Ed noticing. Speaking of Al. “Did you go by the apartment?”

“Yes and Al was sleeping. He did come out long enough to give me a plate.”

“And—”

“And we didn’t eat the sandwich you left him. You are now officially out of ham, though.”

Ed slouched over the table, resting his chin on the papers and offering Lan Fan a silent _thank you_ in the form of a smile. “If I go with you, Ling’ll pay?”

“Under threat of bodily harm,” Ling chirped, oddly cheerful about that. “So move your well-proportioned ass, I’m hungry.”

Ed glared but complied. Very slowly.

—

The restaurant Maes picked smelled of cheap Xingese food and cigarette smoke. Clean, but darkly lit, the place attracted both students and soldiers alike and was the perfect location for Maes and his contingent to badger Roy into good health.

“I am fine,” Roy said for the thirteenth time. Riza, Maes and Havoc answered him with the same flat look they had the other twelve.

“Boss, ya ain’t fine and we know it,” Havoc said from his outer corner of the booth. They had boxed Roy in and he knew before the afternoon ended they would have at least forced a meal into him. “So suck it up already and eat.”

“I am not very hungry.”

“You should order something anyway, sir.” Riza offered Roy a menu but he just placed it directly on the table, not even sparing it a glance.

“Beer has a decent amount of carbs, does that count?” Roy knew he only proved their point by refusing food and going straight for alcohol, but the truth was—he just didn’t have the energy to keep the front up, especially not for the small handful of people immune to his bullshit. That was probably the point, the three of them tugging him away from both of his professional realms to decompress. “And stop calling me sir, I am not your boss.”

“You are my elder however,” she replied coolly and Roy dropped back against the booth cushion to sulk, betrayed. Maes and Havoc oooh’d enthusiastically and Riza rolled her eyes, jabbing Roy in the chest with the rejected menu. “And no, beer does not count. Order something or I’ll do it for you.”

“You were such a sweet little girl.” Roy mused, taking the menu if only to avoid having her strike him over the head with it. “You never bullied me like this when we were younger.”

“And you seem to have gone senile in your advanced years, sir.”

“Riza!” Roy whined and the corner of her lip quirked, betraying her amusement.

“Alright you two, stop flirting—” Maes chirped and then immediately raised placating hands to fend off twin glares shot his way. “—and look at these beautiful photos Elicia took with my phone. She’s so smart, got right past the passcode on her first try. And look, I think she’ll be a photographer, just like her daddy—these angles are so creative.”

“Ya sure these’re intentional? All I see're blurry fingers.”

“Do not question her brilliance!”

Roy dropped his head into his hands so that he could roll his eyes dramatically in peace. He let the sound of his friends bantering chase away the bits of the tension that had been building within his skull ever since he went to the Tucker residence. Havoc was right, Roy wasn’t okay and he probably wouldn’t be for awhile. If he ever had been in the first place.

Roy glanced up at the entrance door when it chimed the arrival of new customers and then immediately dropped his head back into his hands with a groan. “Of course.”

“Ooooh, that sounds promising!” Maes said, twisting in his chair to look at the door, nearly knocking Riza’s drink from the table with his elbow. She calmly moved it and herself a few inches closer to the wall. Havoc snorted, but craned his head to get a look as well.

“Oh hey, it’s Ed!”

“Havoc I swear on my magic if you call him over I will follow you around for a month and burn every cigarette you even think about smoking.”

“That’s cruel, Boss,” Havoc pouted, lowering his hand back to the table. He chewed on the unlit cigarette perpetually in his mouth and then shrugged. “But totally worth it. Yo, Chief! Over he— _fuck_!”

The cigarette flared and crumpled to ash onto the table, leaving just the filter behind between Havoc’s slack lips. Roy sat up, shoved a single finger into Havoc’s face and hissed. “ _One month_.”

“Worth it,” Havoc muttered under his breath as if trying to convince himself. Edward had waved when Havoc called out, but did not seem keen on approaching their table. One of his companions—Yao—of course it was Yao—lit up, waving enthusiastically at Roy as he practically shoved Edward towards their table, Lan Fan trailing behind them. Yao had the kind of smile curling his lips that made Roy want to pack up and run, but Havoc had him effectively trapped against the wall.

“The infamous Edward Elric,” Maes whispered, eyes gleaming a beat before the three newcomers made it to the table. Roy wanted to scream.

“Roy!” Yao practically yelled, startling everyone within a five mile radius; Edward flinched away from him with a glare. “What a surprise!”

“Could ya fuckin’ not?” Edward growled, rubbing his ear. He ducked out from under Yao’s hold so that he could completely ignore Roy in favor of Havoc. “Jean! Been fuckin’ ages, man. How’re things with Becca and Heymans?”

“Smooth as ya’d imagine. Stayin’ outta trouble?” Havoc shot back with a grin, the burnt filter falling out of his mouth unnoticed.

“Yeah, gotta job teaching, if you’d believe it.”

“They’re letting you handle our future generations? Are they insane?”

“Right, I can’t believe—” and Roy zoned out of their conversation as the two of them continued to chatter. Yao pouted and sidled over to kneel onto the empty booth bench behind Roy, but Roy decided to take a page from Edward and completely ignored Yao in favor of Lan Fan. “Lan Fan, how nice to see you again.”

She inclined her head. “It’s been awhile, Mustang.”

Edward broke off from his conversation with Havoc and shot Lan Fan a decidedly betrayed look. “You’re friends with this bastard? I expected it from Ling, but I thought you were cool.”

“ _Cool_? What are we, fourth graders?” Havoc scoffed.

“Fuck you, ya prick,” Edward snapped, but he was grinning. Roy never understood that dynamic; where Roy had failed to receive anything but antagonism from Edward, Havoc reaped affectionate ribbing.

“Some of us are certainly of a height to be.” The words were out of Roy’s mouth before he could trap them behind his teeth and Edward’s face went an immediate, fetching red. Ah, this was why.

“You fuckin’ prick!—” Funny how a change in order could turn a handful of words caustic. “—Just because you’re unnaturally fuckin’ huge—”

“While that is true, my height is rather average.”

Edward went from flushed to _neon_ , his whole face glowing with the sudden rush of blood as he sputtered. Yao howled with laughter, leaning heavily on the booth behind Roy for support.

“What the actual fuck, Mustang!?”

“Hush, Roy,” Riza murmured, voice soft but eyes hard and long suffering. Roy bit his tongue and fixed Ed with a bland smile.

“Well, now that we have the attention of every patron here,” Riza said, clapping her hands together loudly. “Perhaps we should listen to the waiter? He’s been very patiently waiting for us to settle down.”

One glance at their waiter said he’d been doing anything but, lips pressed together in a tight line and spine rigid. His voice was stilted as he asked Edward: “Will you be joining them, or would you like me to find you a table?”

“Our own table!” “Joining them!” Shouted Edward and Yao simultaneously.

“Why don’t you pull over that table, the more the merrier!” Maes suggested and Yao agreed cheerfully, already tugging over the nearest available table. The waiter’s hands clenched around his pen and mini clipboard, but he said nothing as Havoc helped Yao tug chairs over. The fact that Maes and Riza wore their military blues probably played no small part in that.

Under the cover of the noise, Riza leaned over the table and pitched her voice low. “You okay?”

Roy didn’t answer immediately. He listened to the chattering around him, banter and interrogations clashing as the waiter tried desperately to grab any kind of drink order from their strange gathering of people. The noise hampered the racing of his guilt-riddled thoughts even if the anxiety never really left. Yao’s presence did that to him. Overall, however, the arrangement strangely suited him, offering a distraction he hadn’t known he’d needed until Maes and Riza had accosted him at the office and Havoc had offered to drive.

“As okay as I can be.”

“Good.” She picked up the forgotten menu. “Now order something.”

—

In the mess of shifting chairs and garbled orders, Ed barely managed to take stock of his situation.

He’d been shoved into a chair beside Jean in the booth and across from a sharp-eyed man with glasses. Lan Fan and Ling had taken the man’s previous position in the booth next to the female soldier. Ed didn’t know how to feel: overstimulated, angry, panicked—there were just too many people.

First of all, though, he had to deal with the man staring him down from across the table.

“The fuck ya staring at?”

“Your face,” he responded without an ounce of shame. He pushed up his glasses so that they glinted in the low light of the restaurant and continued. “If you keep scowling like that it’ll stick that way.”

Ed blinked at him. Was this dude for real? “What?”

“It’ll stick that way,” the man repeated slowly, grinning. Despite the edge to his eyes, the grin was warm and left Edward wanting to trust him. “You don’t want that do you?”

“Who the fuck're you?”

“Maes Hughes.” He said reaching across the table for Ed’s hand. He didn’t flinch against the unyielding metal beneath Ed’s gloves, so point for him. A point which was immediately revoked as he continued, “I’m Roy’s best friend!”

“No, you are not,” Mustang piped up, not looking away from his conversation with the soldier lady across from him. “Riza is. I only tolerate you.”

“He’s just in a foul mood because we forced him to leave the office,” Maes said cheerfully. “The big moper.”

“This is why you are not my best friend.” Ed heard Mustang mutter under his breath but Maes’s grin only widened.

“Funny thing, that,” Ling chirped. “We had to force Ed out of the library to eat.”

“I think bribe is more accurate,” Lan Fan mused, toying with the water glass their surly waiter had given her. “You’re still going to pay for him. That was the deal.”

“I thought that was only to get him to move!” Ling whined slumping into his chair. “He’s going to ruin my wallet.”

“You bet your ass I am,” Ed snapped, pointing an accusatory finger at Ling who only pouted back at him. “After all the free food you’ve bummed offa me? And this is the second time in as many weeks you’ve fuckin’ interrupted my fuckin’ work—I get nothin’ done with you around. Might as well get food outta ya.”

“That’s hardly fair.”

“Life ain’t fair!”

“Could you save the lovers' quarrel for a later time?”

Ed jerked in his seat, nearly knocking into Jean as his temper flared. Mustang met Ed’s eyes without flinching, face impassive and Ed turned his accusatory finger like a blade on him. “Fuckin’ butt out—”

“Roy, seriously?” the lady—Riza—hissed as she dropped her head into her hands.

“We’re not dating anymore, shame that that is,” Ling interjected, helpful as always. Mustang and Ed ignored him.

“Oh, was this a private matter? I assumed it became public when everyone within a square mile could hear you. I apologize.”

“This’s...exciting.” Jean groaned, sliding further down into the booth, giving Ed a clearer view of the smug bastard’s face. Something lurked in the depths of his dark, narrow eyes but Ed couldn’t parse it from the sarcastic, antagonistic glint. It scratched at Ed’s sympathy all the same.

“I’ll make my fist a public matter for yer face, ya two bit charlatan—”

“Ed you can’t say things like that to a colleague,” Lan Fan hissed and Jean added: “Or to an officer of the law, for that matter.”

They also went ignored. Through his anger, Ed still found himself enthralled by the way Mustang’s smoking fingers tapped agitated, sooty marks into the table cloth as if they burned like cigarette cherries. Despite his duplicitous advertisement of the skill, Mustang’s grasp of flame alchemy went well beyond Ed’s comprehension of the practice and if he weren’t such a fucking dick, Ed would have loved to pick his brain—as it were, he wanted nothing more than to throw something at the bastard’s oversized head.

“Do you think you could land a hit without a step ladder? I admit, I would be rather impressed if you did—”

“We are in a public place where any number of your students could possibly see you.” Riza had her head back out of her hands and she looked ready to draw her sidearm at any moment. Ed almost hesitated, sure she could riddle him through with holes before he could clap his hands together and duck, but irrational frustration won out.

“Who you calling so short you’d need a microscope to see him swing, you prick?!”

 _“Excuse me!_ ” Ed nearly jumped out of his seat at the unfamiliar voice at his back, hands an inch from smacking together to set off a transmutation before he realized it was their waiter, red-faced and utterly through with them. Ed slowly lowered his hands to the table and out of the corner of his eye he saw Mustang tug a menu over the small burn holes he’d made with his fingers. The waiter crossed his arms over his chest and did his best to glare down the mismatched party of people. “You’re disturbing the other patrons. If you can’t keep yourselves under control, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“Of course,” Maes said with a bright, apologetic smile. “We’re so sorry for the trouble, we’ll keep it down.”

“See that you do.”

Ed slumped in his seat, crossing his arms over his chest; his cheeks burned with embarrassment, growing hotter when Riza turned her disapproving glare from Mustang to him. He didn’t even know her, but Ed didn’t think she was the kind of person he should disappoint. In a matter of moments, the others settled into calmer conversation and even managed to order when their waiter came back around.

“So how’re you finding teaching, Mustang?” Lan Fan asked, drawing Ed’s attention from stewing in his own mortification back to the people around him. “This is your first semester, right?”

Ed didn’t see the wary glance Mustang shot his way before answering because he was too busy glaring at his water glass. “Actually, this is my fourth time teaching _Concepts of Magic_  at Central University. I unfortunately do not have enough time to dedicate to a full semester, so I only teach half courses, but I do enjoy it when I get the chance.”

“As if you can call spouting nonsense to a bunch of dumbass kids too naive to see they’re bein’ fuckin’ conned _teaching,_ ” Ed mumbled quietly so as not to attract the ire of their waiter once again. Lan Fan slapped a palm to her forehead, but in Ed’s defense, she should have known better than to bring up teaching around him.

“ _At least_ —” Mustang hissed, looking ready to wrap his smoking fingers around Ed’s throat and Ed could relate because the feeling was fucking mutual. “—I am not trying to sabotage your classes with disruptive students!”

Ed looked up from trying to glare a hole in his water glass and stared incredulously at Roy. “The fuck ya on about?”

“Some upstart named Stenson interrupted class to sing your praise and—”

“...Stenson, like, Kevin Stenson?” Ed asked as the trailing edges of his anger dispersed.

“He is _your_ student.”

Ed couldn’t help it, he laughed. “Fuck, he's in your class now? I had to deal with him for a whole fuckin’ semester and he spent the whole time starin’ at me all creepy like and he’d wait after class to ask the _dumbest_ questions just so he could hang around—doesn’t know a damn thing about alchemy, let me tell you.”

A little of the tension eased from Mustang’s shoulders “...So he has not been skulking about my class at your bidding?”

“Fuck no!” Ed slapped his hand against the table for emphasis and immediately withdrew it when their surly waiter approached with the first half of their food, glaring pointedly at Ed. Ed waited until he was gone to continue, voice lowered. “Look, I wouldn’t send that pervert to anyone’s classes, especially not as my representative. And you can tell ‘im I said so, too. He fuckin’ flunked out of my class, and been banned from the rest, the fuck’s he on about interrupting someone else’s lessons in my name?”

“Wait, is this the kid that kept trying to touch your hair?” Lan Fan asked, chipmunking her mouth full of food to one side so she could speak clearly. “And wouldn’t shut up about your butt?”

“I remember him!” Ling sang, nicking one of Lan Fan’s dumplings from her plate. She deftly snatched it back before he could get it to his mouth. He pouted and then immediately cheered back up as he continued. “I had a nice chat with him about proper student-teacher relationships after you went to Doctor Curtis. He seemed very receptive to my point.”

The waiter returned with the rest of their food, saving the table from needing to respond to that. Everyone turned to their meals and the chatter at the table resumed. Ed had to admit, despite the rocky start, it felt nice to escape the library. Guilt immediately washed in and he shoved his hand into his pocket for his phone to check if Al had messaged him.

He had and if Ed believed in that sort of shit, he’d think his brother was clairvoyant. _Enjoy lunch with Ling and Lan Fan, Brother!_

_Get some rest, idiot. Want anything?_

In reality, Ling or Lan Fan probably messaged him before they came to kidnap Ed from the library. Underneath Al’s message was one from Winry reminding him that she was coming up to visit in a month and to _get started on that wasteland of an apartment cuz I know you two will put it off to the last minute and I’m NOT sharing the couch with your research this time, alchemy-freak!_

Ed grinned and typed out a quick reply: _at least paper doesn’t bruise grease-monkey, try sharin a bed with a wrench!_

Ed lay his phone next to his plate and so saw it buzz with an immediate response from Winry, message short enough the small screen didn’t cut it off: _One word research-junkie: papercuts_.

Ed left it for now, and dug into his food, quietly taking in the conversations bouncing around him without really wanting to join in himself. Lan Fan had returned to her earlier line of inquiry with Mustang, fending off Ling’s attempts to steal what little was left on her plate. Riza listened, shifting aside the menu Mustang had tugged over the burns he’d left in the table cloth to free up space between their clutter of plates. The singed edges reminded Ed of Mustang’s earlier alchemy display when Jean had called him over.

“Your precision's insane,” Ed said before he could stop himself. Mustang looked at him questioningly and Ed shrugged, picking at his food. “The thing you did with Jean’s cigarette, you know, the whole not-lighting-his-entire-fuckin’-face-on-fire in the process bit.”

“You...noticed that.” Mustang’s tone dropped at the end as if he’d meant to make it a question but embarrassment flattened it into a statement. Ed matched his gaze without responding because, yeah, he noticed that—pretty fucking hard not to when he’d been staring straight at their table at the time. Mustang pursed his lips as if realizing the same thing. “Of course you did. I...thank you?”

Ed flushed and waved him off, thrown that he was even managing a conversation with Mustang at all. “Elemental alchemy’s a bitch, gotta acknowledge skill when I see it.”

There was a pause, one in which Ed tensed along with the rest of the table because, wow, what a sure-fire way to start back their previous argument. No backlash followed his statement

“I appreciate the compliment,” Mustang said instead, stiff but polite and Ed took that as a win.

“Awwww, look at you two getting along, ain’t it sweet?” Ling cooed, dropping his chin into his hands as he leaned his elbows against the table. Mustang turned his attention on Ling, his glare promising physical retribution. Ling tilted his head to the side and gave his best shit-eating, bright-as-fool’s-gold grin. Ed exchanged a look with Mustang and found himself sharing a surprising moment of solidarity with him, as he too seemed to want to strangle Ling. Lan Fan beat them both to the punch, smacking Ling upside his fucking fat head.

They devolved into bickering from there and the rest of the table settled into their food and conversation, the previous tension gone.

—

Ed quietly slipped into his apartment, a small bag of takeout slapping against his thigh as he used his hip to close the door behind him. The light was on in the living room, illuminating the disaster of books, coffee cups and ungraded papers scattered across every available surface. As Ed walked further into the room, Al looked up from his laptop, blinking blearily at Ed as he surfaced from whatever he’d been reading. “Hey Al.”

“Huh…?”  Al slurred, trying to focus on Ed’s face and Ed kicked himself for not noticing earlier, but the bluish light of the computer had washed out the sallow tinge of his skin. Al blinked again slowly and his wheat-gold eyes sharpened before Ed could properly start tearing into himself. “Oh, you're home early.”

“Wasn't getting anything done on campus.” Ed blew out his breath, fluttering his fringe with the force of it. “Nevermind that, you should be fucking resting, you know, not staring at a computer screen.”

“I have another quiz tomorrow.”

“Skip it, you look like shit.”

“How sweet,” Al muttered as he stretched his arms up high above his head, back arching. It cracked and he melted back into a slump with a satisfied hum. “I'm fine, really. Just a little tired.”

Ed glared at him, trying to parse out a lie but Al stared back evenly. Alert and no longer bathed in the computer's light, Al at least looked marginally closer to his usual anemic pallor. Ed continued to glare, not at all satisfied and Al huffed. “Stop that, I _am_ fine. Why don't you tell me about lunch, did you enjoy yourself?”

Ed dropped his bag on the ground and the takeout on their cluttered coffee table before dropping himself onto the couch. “It was stupid.”

“You looked happy when you walked in.” Al closed his laptop and placed it next to the takeout so that he could curl against one arm of the couch and look at Ed. Ed huffed and slumped into the cushions until the entire lower half of his body sprawled off the end and his neck bent at an awkward angle against the back. His automail foot kicked his bag further under the coffee table.

“...I guess it was kinda okay,” Ed mumbled, surprised when he realized he meant it. Despite the bumpy (read: disastrous) start, conversation had settled into something smooth and easy-flowing among the odd gathering of people. “Lan Fan made Ling pay, which was awesome.”

“How was Mage Mustang?”

“ _What?_ ” Ed’s ass hit the ground as he fell the rest of the way off the couch. His knee smacked against the table as he scrambled to sit back up and gape at Al. “How the fuck do you know about that?!”

“Ling sent me a picture. You looked like you were having a good time talking to Mage—” Al winced away from Ed's wordless shriek of indignation. “Brother, _honestly!_ ”

“I’m gunna kill that asshole! Why’s he always gotta fuckin’ meddle?” Ed growled as he got his knees underneath him. He stood sharply, but his righteous ire faltered when Al started laughing. “What?”

“You’re ridiculous,” Al said with a giggle. His grin turned mischievous as he showed Ed the screen on his phone. The picture was poorly focused and partially obscured by a water glass, but taking up the rest of the image was Ed with his mouth open and blurred hands in the air, obviously mid-gesture. Jean had pressed back against the booth to avoid Ed’s hands, but Mustang was leaning forward, dark eyes trained on Ed with an unmistakeable interest in whatever Ed was saying. Ed hadn’t noticed that at the table, but now able to properly examine Mustang’s expression, it made Ed’s stomach swoop uncertainly. Al switched off his phone and shoved it in his pocket, still grinning. “Y’all look nice together, cute even.”

Ed’s cheeks heated. “Delete it.”

“Absolutely not.”

“So fuckin’ help me, Al, if you don’t delete that stupid picture, I’ll fuckin’ make you.”

“I’d like to see you try,” Al challenged and Ed met him, launching himself back onto the couch to wrestle the phone from Al.

And like always, Ed lost spectacularly.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This...chapter turned into a monster. Please enjoy! And the largest thank you I can manage to Kat and Andy for checking through this and catching continuity issues. Y'all're a godsend.

“Yo, look at these mushrooms!”

“Woah, they’re so pretty! Hold on, lemme grab a picture.”

“Have you ever seen a faerie circle this wide before?”

“Nah—Oh! Wait, yeah, actually. Just the other day near the Alchemy Complex—aw, fuck, man, my camera’s screwing up something major.”

“What, really? Didn’t you just get that thing last week?”

“Yeah, it’s brand new. Try yours while I restart it.”

“Sure thing.”

“Fuck! Piece of shit won’t even turn on now! Any luck?”

“...no. The screen keeps blacking out. What the hell?”

“Damn, guess it’s not meant to be.”

“Guess not.”

—

“Hey, Boss!”

Roy dropped the pen he’d been spinning between his fingers to the table with a loud clatter, jolted from his tired, wandering thoughts. Havoc snickered from where he sat with his feet up on his own desk, waving his phone to get Roy’s attention.

“Didn’t mean to scare ya,” he said, still grinning. “But I got Doctor Mauro on the line. Awake enough to chat?”

It took Roy a moment to connect why he would want to talk to Havoc’s old specialist, but then the cogs in his brain unstuck and he hastily stood up. “I am.”

“Cool, cool,” Havoc said and then tossed the phone across the room before Roy could move from behind his desk and retrieve it from him. Roy overreached for it, fumbling the slick thing in his hand until he had a firm grip. With the way Havoc laughed at him, he was tempted to just let it drop or flare his magic so that it malfunctioned faster than it was already bound to do in Roy’s hands. He answered the phone.

“Doctor Mauro? This is Detective Mustang.”

“ _Ah, yes, hello. Good morning._ ”

Roy frowned. The gravelly voice that greeted him sounded familiar in a vague, nostalgic way. “Good morning...”

“ _Jean mentioned you’d like to speak with me about healing_.”

“I would. I have been approached by someone who said they would like to research medicinal magic—”

“ _If it’s only research, send them to a library ._ ”

Roy scrunched up his nose against the brusque brush-off. “If it were only research, that is exactly what I would have done. However I have reason to believe that there is far more to it than that. He is sick, apparently without reason, and so far modern medicine and alchemy both have turned up neither a cause nor a cure.”

“ _You think it’s magical?_ ”

“I do.”

“ _How sick is he?_ ”

“I am not sure, but based on appearance alone, he looks to be wasting away.”

“ _Describe him to me?_ ”

Roy thought back on the last time he saw Alphonse Elric and how washed out he’d been in comparison to Edward. “He is incredibly thin and the areas under his eyes looks terribly bruised. His coloring, not just his skin, but his eyes and hair as well, lack...vitality? Compared to his older brother, his appearance is lackluster.”

_“And his brother?”_

“What about his brother?”

Doctor Mauro huffed, the sound cracking a bit as the phone started to react to Roy’s magical signature. _“Describe him as well.”_

“Oh, well…” Roy hesitated, briefly glancing over at the others in the room. Breda and Ross pretended not to listen in on the conversation, but their lack of movement gave them away. Havoc had no such qualms letting Roy know he was eavesdropping and he grinned when their eyes met. Roy sighed through his nose. “His brother is absolutely vibrant. Everything about him is golden: his skin, his hair, his eyes. I have never seen coloring like his before on this earth, which makes his brother’s lack thereof so alarming.”

Havoc’s grin grew and he mouthed something at Roy that looked suspiciously like _mention his ass._ Roy once again considered dropping the phone or maybe shoving it down Havoc’s throat for good measure but he settled on flipping Havoc off. Havoc blew him a kiss and the quirk of Ross’s lips confirmed that she was not only listening, but watching from the corner of her eye. Breda’s face remained placid.

 _“What about his energy levels? How are they in comparison?”_ Doctor Mauro’s voice cut in and out, but he sounded far more interested than he had before.

“Edward is...very energetic. I do not know if that has anything to do with his absurd coffee consumption, however.”

_“Is he a magic user?”_

“No. In fact, he vehemently denies the existence of magic despite the obvious truth that it exists. He is, however, an incredibly talented alchemist.”

_“What are the younger brother’s thoughts on magic?”_

“Not nearly as rigid.”

_“I see. I think I may have an idea what is going on, but I would like you to try a few things before I say anything. Have a pen?”_

“I do.”

 _“Good, listen closely._ ”

Roy picked up a pen and pad of paper and sat back down to write.

—

    From: Roy Mustang  
  
    To:  Alphonse Elric  
  
    Date:  Sat, Oct 21, 20— at 15:32  
  
    Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Requesting your assistance with private project

Alphonse,

I believe your first mistake is looking at magic as a science. It is an art that occasionally aligns with science, but, more often than not, follows its own rules. They can look similar, but there are fundamental differences between magic and alchemy. Magic can twist reality, but it reacts to strong emotion, making it tricky to control at best and unpredictable at worst. There is a reason there are only a few State recognized mages, but quite a few magic users for hire—many people simply do not want to increase their power and risk a flare-up, choosing to stick to easier practices. Alchemy, on the other hand, has no such issue. Practitioners are limited by their knowledge of the materials they work with, but with enough study, they can create amazing things with just a stick of chalk and some research.

I believe a meeting may be more beneficial than e-mailing at this point, if you are amenable.

Roy Mustang (Det.)

Civilian State Mage

Central City Police Department: Magic Division

—

    From: Alphonse Elric  
  
    To:  Roy Mustang  
  
    Date:  Mon, Oct 23, 20— at 08:32  
  
    Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Requesting your assistance with private project

Dear Mage Mustang,

I could meet you after your lecture tomorrow.

Alphonse Elric

—

Ed approached Tuesday with unreasonable uncertainty. After one relatively civil conversation not even a week prior, Ed didn’t know how he should behave around Mustang and it caused Ed unending anxiety. Should he nod to Mustang? Should he say hello? Or should he ignore him like he'd always (read: never) done?

Ed dug the fingers of his free hand into the base of his ponytail and tugged, half to stop his rambling train of thought and half in sheer frustration. His other hand clenched around his coffee and the automail pressure sensors—great for everyday tasks, but never for delicate ones—didn't register how hard until his fingertips met his palm and heat seared across his thighs.

“ _God fuckin’ dammit!”_ Ed’s bag slipped down his shoulder as he jerked back reflexively and dropped the crushed paper cup at his feet, spilling the remaining coffee all over his boots and the hallway floor. Several students jumped back and Ed would have been mortified by the number of them that were caught in the crossfire, but his thighs burned something fierce, so he was more concerned with the second fucking degree burns he’d just potentially given himself.

“ _Fuck fuck fuck_ .” Ed dropped to his knees to rifle through his bag for chalk. He’d never performed circle-less alchemy in front of his students, and while it was tempting to break that habit now to rid himself and the floor of coffee, he knew he’d regret the backlash, but _fuck_ it hurt and maybe no one would—

“Having trouble there, Professor Elric?“

“Of fuckin’ course,” Ed groaned, dropping his head in defeat. What a fucking day. “Get your laughs in, Mustang, I know you wunna.”

“That would not be very sporting,” Mustang said in that odd, contractionless way of his, and, yeah he didn’t laugh, but when Ed looked up the bastard did have his lips pressed together as if he were suppressing the urge. The amused crinkles at the corners of his narrow eyes would’ve been cute if Ed didn’t want to smack him so badly.

Ed glared at Mustang, trying not to flush. Students had stopped to watch the commotion, slowing on their way to whatever lesson they had first thing at the goddamn crack of dawn. At least the coffee had started to cool, leaving behind a tacky, uncomfortable wetness. Fucking stellar. “What do ya fuckin’ want, then?”

“Just to help a fellow teacher in need, although why you do not just clap and—” Ed frantically shook his head as he realized what Mustang was about to say, hoping he’d get the hint. Mustang frowned but changed course without pause as he offered Ed a hand up. “—magic away the mess?”

“That’s your job, ya quack,” Ed snapped back, inwardly relieved; after a moment’s deliberation, he took the offered hand and hoisted himself up. A snap of static electricity bit at his palm through his glove and he let go quickly. Mustang shook his hand out, obviously having felt it as well. “I need fuckin’ chalk if I’m gunna get this cleaned up, unless _you_ can ‘clap and magic it away.’”

“Not clap, exactly,” Mustang said and then he snapped his fingers and the mess on the floor vanished in a wave of heat and an aroma of concentrated coffee. Ed blinked, dumbfounded. One of the students still watching them gasped and gave an excited little clap; Ed grudgingly agreed with the sentiment. That was some slick fucking alchemy. “There. No longer a lawsuit waiting to happen. It might be a bit sticky, however.”

“Can you do that to my pants?”

“Snap and make them disappear?” Mustang asked with a grin. “Leave them sticky? I certainly could try.”

“You fucker—”

“But if you mean get rid of the coffee, no. I am terrible at delicate cleaning magicks. However, there is usually chalk in my classroom. I do not have the luxury of a whiteboard, but that seems to work in your favor this morning, as my classroom is far closer than yours.”

“Lead the way.” Ed could still feel blood burning in his cheeks and he covered that by bending over to snatch up his bag from the ground; his pants chafed uncomfortably against his thighs, the skin sensitive and irritated. Ed noticed a stray pen had rolled a bit away from his bag and he reached to grab it, not noticing when a student stepped forward until a flash of fire burst above Ed’s head. Without thinking, Ed slammed his hands together and whirled around to face the threat as ash snowed into his hair, hands crackling with blue-gold alchemical discharge.

A large, charred bit of crumpled paper swept past his nose, sticking to the coffee residue at Ed’s feet when it fluttered to the ground. Several of the few remaining students in the hallway had stopped dead, staring wide-eyed at Ed. Their gaze shifted over Ed’s head to concentrate on Mustang and only then did it dawn on Ed that there was no immediate threat. He shot up and pivoted to face Mustang.

“The _fuck_?”

“My apologies, Edward, that was a tad dramatic,” Mustang said, his voice calm but his eyes cold as they stared down someone behind Ed. “However, I was not exactly expecting an assault so early in the morning.”

“And I wasn’t expecting a fuckin’ heart attack.” Ed rolled his shoulders, muscles tight and jumpy as he released the energy he’d gathered for a transmutation back into the ground and then turned back around to the small crowd. He immediately picked out a familiar face glowering at them—no, at _Mustang_ —and his already brittle temper cracked. “Stenson!?”

“Sir!” Stenson squeaked, gaze melting from its glower to something dewy as he turned his attention on Ed. The crowd of students subtly receded, leaving a gap of empty floor between them and Stenson. Ed’s skin crawled as if suddenly each tiny hair had uprooted itself and started marching up and down his skin. There was a reason this kid was banned from taking anymore of Ed’s classes. Not to fucking mention he’d nearly startled Ed into a defensive transmutation right after Ed had to remind himself _not_ to perform circle-less alchemy.

“ _Explain_.”

Stenson startled at the sharp demand but then lifted his chin and started speaking quickly, “He was staring at you inappropriately, Professor Edward and—”

“Mr. Elric,” Ed corrected through his teeth.

“Mr. Edward,” Stenson said hastily and Ed twitched because, no, that was still wrong, but Stenson kept going. “And I knew you wouldn’t appreciate it, because you’ve said so before, you know, about inappropriateness, and I didn’t know what to do, so I threw my notes at him—”

“How the fuck does that make any sense?”

“I was protecting your dignity—”

“My dignity!?” Ed all but screeched and no one noticed as the hands of the clock on the wall silently announced the start of class. The straggling students stayed put and when Ed glanced to the side he noticed other instructors had stuck their heads out of the classrooms to scope out the commotion. A heavy hand dropped against Ed’s shoulder and he tensed, but the message was clear: _calm down._ Ed fought his initial violent reaction and inhaled deeply, counting backwards from ten as he held his breath and then released it. He did it again for good measure and then addressed the onlookers. “Y’all need to get your asses to class, this ain’t a sideshow.”

“We’re waiting on Mage Mustang, sir,” a tiny girl said, apologetic grin nervous and jerky. Ed winced with guilt. He just knew he was going to get chewed out for this. The anxiety twisted up his stomach.

“I will be right there,” Mustang said and Ed jerked, surprised by how close his silken voice was to Ed’s ear. Mustang dropped his hand from Ed’s shoulder and the area burned enough that Ed glanced to the side, expecting to see smoke but finding nothing.

The girl looked like she wanted to protest, but one of her friends grabbed her elbow and tugged her along. “We’ll let the others know you’re coming soon.”

“Thank you.” Mustang moved so that he stood next to Ed and with the two of them staring him down, Stenson wilted. The remaining students begrudgingly left, dragging their feet, but Ed waited. When the hall emptied, Mustang spoke and Ed had never heard his voice so cold. “Stenson, your latest display of antagonism and your continual disruptions of my lectures leave me with little choice. Either dismiss yourself from future lectures or I will take matters up with your department head regarding this most recent altercation.”

Stenson opened his mouth to protest but Ed interrupted, wanting this conversation over and done with. “You remember that conversation we had with Doctor Curtis?”

Stenson blanched. “Yes, sir.”

“Ya wunna have it again?”

“No, sir.”

“Fuckin’ good.” Ed ran a hand through his hair and grimaced as ash fluttered around him and his fingers stopped at the ponytail holder. He had to look an absolute mess. “So leave Mustang alone, would ya? He ain’t done nothin’ to ya and you’ve no right or reason fuckin’ up his class when you couldn’t even pass mine. Now get.”

Stenson still looked like he'd like nothing more than to protest, but something stopped him and he scrambled away without another word.

“Well, this morning’s sucked ass,” Ed said as he watched Stenson go and Mustang actually huffed a laugh. “Fuck, you better get to your class or whatever.”

“What about your pants?”

“Wouldn’t ya like to know, Detective Pervert,” Ed said and grinned tiredly to show he was joking. “I’ll have to raincheck the chalk for now. I’m sure there’s some lying around my classroom, anyway—it’s an alchemy building after all.”

“That it is.” Mustang nodded a farewell but before he’d even made it a step away, he said, “Make sure not to ruin them, they suit your figure quite well.”

It took Ed a moment to parse Mustang’s meaning,and by the time his caffeine-deprived brain caught up Mustang’d already slipped into his classroom.

“Oh, fuck you,” Ed said to the empty hallway, glad Mustang couldn’t see his fucking blush.

—

Kevin scuffed a shoe against the dying grass, rubber sole scraping up the crunchy blades and sending them flying in his embarrassed anger. If that ass Mustang hadn’t used his stupid alchemy and startled Professor Edward, Kevin would have won points with him, he was sure of that. Yet, hadn’t they seemed friendly?

Nah, that was impossible—Mustang stood for everything that Professor Edward fought against. They could never get along. The thought cheered Kevin immensely as he continued his walk home, injecting his dragging steps with a bit of a bounce.

He stopped almost immediately. A large faerie circle of tightly packed mushrooms with peeling caps and flared heads blocked his path. Had he been so distracted by his own thoughts that he hadn’t noticed them until he nearly stepped into the ring? He was sure they hadn’t been there before but mushrooms didn’t grow between one heartbeat and the next, that would be absurd.

They were a plain, greyish-white in color, utterly unremarkable aside from the perfect circle they sketched out into the campus grounds and the urge to stomp on them made his skin itch. Kevin had once read that faerie circles were portals to another world, a faerie’s magical doorway to snatch up unwitting humans for—well, he really didn’t know _what,_ for but the story had made it sound ominous. That had to be bullshit, since if magic didn’t exist then faeries definitely didn’t.

Which was why, very deliberately, he stepped into the center of the ring of mushrooms instead. For a beat he stood there, heart racing and breath coming short, but...nothing happened. He laughed, vindicated.

“Take that, you stupid faeries!” Kevin crowed, dancing against the hard ground. “I knew you didn—”

With a jolt, the world tilted sideways and melted away in a wash of color. Warm air tore at his skin, smelling like blackberry flowers and stinging like brambles. His knees gave out and hit the ground with a sharp spike of pain that left him breathless. The ground beneath his palms burned like dry ice and when he inhaled, he didn’t recognize the taste of the air.

_No!_

His mind rejected what he saw before him, recoiled from the purple sky and silver moon and the flat black of a jagged forest in the distance. None of that should exist. Not in Central. Not past dawn.

 _This isn’t real_.

He peeled his stinging hands from the ground and saw hundreds of tiny cuts where bladed grass had pressed into his palm. Blood beaded in tiny pinpricks of black and in his panic the color captivated him. “What the hell?”

The warm air shifted again with wind and the grass came alive with color. Flowers in explosions of red tore up through the ground and the tops of too-long, pale feet entered his field of vision. Kevin screamed, scrambling back without even registering the owner. He tried to scream again, throat closing around the sound as he took in the man looming over him. He was gorgeous in an unearthly, terrifying way—but Kevin couldn’t pinpoint any one thing that wasn’t human.

_Not human, not human!_

Bright red scars like butterfly wings wrapped around the creature’s neck. His— _its!_ —teeth flashed as bright as the moon when it grinned.

“You know,” the thing said, tilting its head to the side as Kevin cowered against the ground. “I would have let you go on with your miserable life if not for that little bit of mockery. As it stands, that will cost you.”

“Not real, not real, not real,” Kevin muttered, digging his fingers into his hair as he shook. The thing tsked at him.

“And there you go again. Not real, you say.” It knelt in front of Kevin and stared him straight in the face with eyes black from corner to corner. “Does this strike you as unreal?”

Kevin screamed as roots climbed up from the ground and dug deep into his very pores, blossoming into a riot of color. Blood trickled from the new wounds, feeding the flowers as Kevin sobbed and tugged at them, but they had embedded themselves too deep too quick and they didn’t give.

“ _PleaSE STOP MAKE IT STOP!!_ ”

“Of course,” It said and against the pain its voice slid into Kevin’s ears like silk and cool water. “I will happily soothe the pain if you provide me with the information I desire. How does that sound to you?”

The slash of a smile unsettlingly white like exposed bone was all Kevin could make out of the creature’s face through the tears burning his eyes. The blurry pink and purple blobs of the flowers clung to the vines digging deep into his veins, curling along every inch of his circulatory system as they endeavored to replace his blood. He needed them to stop. He needed the pain to stop. He nodded.

“Very good, my dear idiot. Now, what can you tell me about that school of yours?”

—

Al looked worse than when they first met. His features ghosted Ed's, pale comparisons that if he were in the prime of his health would glow just as bright as his brother's, Roy thought.

"I'm sorry I'm late I..." Alphonse hesitated, gripping the strap of his messenger bag until it looked like he would rip it in half if his hands weren't so thin. He inhaled deeply and then shrugged the bag off his shoulder, letting it hit the ground softly. "Brother and I aren't separate often, not when I look like this. It took a while to convince him that I didn't need him to escort me back to the apartment. I had to remind him he had a class to teach."

"I saw him earlier on my way to my own lecture. We ran into a spot of trouble." Roy said as he gestured towards one of the tables facing the podium. The seats were nailed into the floor, but he had already pulled a chair from his side of the room to one of the students’ tables so that they could sit across from each other. Alphonse left his bag on the floor and fell into the seat, shoulders hunched. Roy joined him.

“That explains the coffee stains and blush.” Alphonse grinned but it faded immediately. He went silent for a moment, and Roy saw the same guilt in this brother as he did in the other.

"I think that maybe you should tell your brother what you are doing."

Alphonse snorted, eyes not quite meeting Roy's. "Ling thinks so too. Brother would just lose his temper, and he has enough to worry about, anyway."

"I think most of what he is worrying about is you." Roy shrugged when Alphonse fixed him with a blank stare. "I have only known him for a few years and not as a friend, but I have always had the impression that he cares a great deal for those important to him."

"And that's why I can't say anything to him," Alphonse said, tapping the table hard with two fingers. "He'll take it personally, like he's somehow failed me. I know my brother, Mage Mustang, and there is no way he would take me going behind his back as anything other than a failing on his part."

"It is not my place to tell you how to handle Edward," Roy conceded.

"It's not," Alphonse agreed and the steel in his eyes assured Roy that even in his weakened state, Alphonse was not someone to cross. His eyes softened and Alphonse slumped again with a tiny sigh. "But I appreciate your concern. You seem like a good man and I appreciate that you're willing to help me when you really don't even know me. So, why did you want to meet?"

"One of my men knows a healer." Roy fumbled in his pocket to pull out a folded sheet of paper that he spread out onto the table between them. "He wanted me to ask you a few questions so as to get a better idea of what your condition may be."

“A healer?” Alphonse asked and Roy met his eye, raising his eyebrows in silent challenge. Roy saw no reason for Alphonse to deny that his interest in healing magic was anything other than self serving. Alphonse seemed to agree, giving a tiny nod. "Is he trustworthy?"

"Yes." Roy didn't necessarily like Doctor Mauro, but if Havoc vouched for him, the man at least had Roy's trust. "But I also neglected to mention your name to him."

"It's very kind of him to help." Alphonse didn’t seem convinced, but that was fine, Roy just needed him to answer a few questions and to make a few observations of his own. "Couldn't you have just sent the questions via email?"

"Yes, but with my schedule, I can only reply rarely. This seemed more expedient." Roy tapped the paper between them, scribbled with his shorthand.

"Alright, then, let's see what we have here."

_Is there any trigger to your fatigue?_

"None that I have noticed."

Roy nodded, absently taking notes with a pen he’d pulled from his jacket pocket.

_Do you experience hallucinations during your periods of fatigue?_

"I don't think so? Sometimes my vision gets a bit hazy and it looks like certain things are glowing gold."

_Do you experience moments of forgetfulness?_

"Well, if I did, I wouldn't remember them would I?”

"Those were the only questions that he gave me," Roy said after he jotted down the answers. "However, I have a visual test that I would also like to try."

"Go ahead, though those seemed rather simple for a healer to ask."

Roy shrugged again, not really understanding the motivation behind the three questions himself. They had come with a series of instructions however, that Roy now followed. He showed both palms to Alphonse and then snapped, willing flame to swirl to life between his fingertips. Alphonse's eyes widened and then glazed over for a moment as Roy toyed with the flame, manipulating it like a snake charmer until fire danced up and down his arms. He kept it from singeing his clothing, but most of his concentration was on watching Alphonse's face.

"Your grasp of fire alchemy is really amazing," Alphonse said after a moment, but his words sounded sluggish and his eyes still hadn't focused properly. Out of the corner of his eye, something flashed gold like a pulse beat at Alphonse's neck, but it was gone as soon as Roy noticed it. "Brother thinks so too."

"He told me so over lunch a bit ago," Roy responded, calling the flames back to his palms with a frown. "But I am not performing alchemy. That was magic."

"No, it couldn't be. You have an array on your hand, isn't that the focal point?"

"Do you see flint? From what I understand, the only way to produce flame via alchemy is with a starter, but as you can see, I have none." Roy banished the flames and held his palms up again for Alphonse to inspect. Alphonse squinted and then reached for Roy's hands so that he could look at them better. A flare like static electricity sparked across where their palms met, but it may as well have been lightning for how Roy startled.

"Oh, I'm sorry!” Alphonse shook out his hand and then rubbed his fingers across his palm to chase away the sensation. Roy frowned—he’d felt that exact sensation from Edward before.

"No need to apologize," Roy said leaving his hands where they were, but Alphonse did not reach for them a second time. Roy lowered them to the table and tapped his fingers against the plastic, certain now that a theory of his had been proven correct. The Elrics were not so magicless as they would like to believe. “Would you perform a basic transmutation for me?”

“Sure?” Alphonse frowned thoughtfully and then dug into his bag under the table, resurfacing with a grease pencil and some crumpled paper.

“Can you not do the clap alchemy that Edward does?” Roy asked as Alphonse placed pencil to paper. He jerked, looking up in surprise.

“You know about that?”

“Yes, he used it the first time I met him,” Roy explained, wincing at the memory. Roy had been a beat cop answering a complaint about unlicensed commercial alchemy, Edward had been his usual belligerent self. Alphonse raised a brow in question, surreptitiously hiding the paper he’d smudged under the stack. Roy continued, “I tried to arrest him—he used it to escape and humiliated me in front of this tiny old woman he had been helping. I was too shocked to go after him.”

“You were trying to arrest him for helping a little old lady?” Al asked, tone dry as old bone. He had never looked or sounded more like his brother than in that moment. “How honorable.”

“I was arresting him for verbally assaulting an officer and that was only _after_ I informed him that all I needed was verbal confirmation that he would not perform commercial alchemy without a license again. I was  _trying_ to give him an out, but instead he disparaged my magic and dug himself into a hole...and then dug himself back out of it with alchemy.”

“Ah, that does sound like him.”

“Honestly, I had no problem with what he was doing—never have—but he made it nearly impossible to help him. He is lucky that it was me or one of my men who usually handled his misdemeanors.”

“See, you did help him out.” Alphonse smiled at him and then touched his hands to the circle he had drawn while they talked. The pages of crumpled paper smoothed out and folded together into a series of crisp mountains and valleys, coming together as a phoenix, pristine and regal on the table. Roy, however, didn’t notice it beyond his quiet surprise. Threaded through the typical blue discharge of an alchemical reaction had glittered gold light, ghostly pale but there nonetheless.

“Have your transmutations always produced gold light?” Roy asked as he reached for the phoenix. It really was something; from Roy’s understanding of alchemy, something this intricate took a good deal of finesse and study.

Alphonse frowned, sharp eyes clouded with confusion. “What gold?”

Certainly Roy hadn’t imagined it? The color struck him as familiar, but he couldn’t pull the memory free from his mind. “Nevermind. This is a beautiful transmutation, by the way. I have never seen anything like it.”

“I had a lot of free time in the hospital and not a lot of reading material at first, not until Brother came to visit,” Alphonse said with a shrug and it was the first time he had admitted his illness outright to Roy. “Creating my own transmutation circles passed the time.”

“What were you in the hospital for?”

“Ah, I suppose I haven’t told you.” Alphonse pulled the phoenix to himself, lifting it with both hands until it obscured his eyes. “There was an incident when Brother and I were younger. I don’t remember any of it. One day everything was fine and the next I woke up in the hospital three years later. Our friend Winry had become this beautiful young woman and Brother, he had automail and too many years behind his eyes. Brother’d come here to Central to find a way to wake me up, and then came back a second time when it became apparent that I was dying.”

Roy sucked in a breath, caught off guard. He hadn’t know the extent of Alphonse’s illness and it shone a new light on Edward’s constant prickliness. “You are dying?”

“Can you think of another explanation?” Alphonse said it so calmly, but his hands shook for a moment and when he lowered the paper phoenix back to the table, Roy caught fear in his eyes. “I don’t expect a miracle, I don’t even expect to survive whatever is happening to me, but I can’t stand not knowing what it is. Worst of all, I can’t stand what it’s doing to Brother. I want him to have his life back.”

“I do not think he would want a life without you in it.”

“He’d survive, he’s strong,” Alphonse said with conviction. “But I’d prefer to live. Do you think this healer can help?”

“I do.”

“Good.” Alphonse grabbed his grease pencil and retrieved his bag from under the table, leaving behind the phoenix. “Would you email me when you know something?”

“Of course.”

“Thank you. I better get going before classes end. I don’t want to find out what would happen if Brother caught me coming out of your classroom.”

“I understand,” Roy said, and then before he could help himself. “You should really consider telling your brother the truth.”

“Your suggestion is noted, Mage Mustang.” With that, Alphonse disappeared through the door, leaving Roy alone with his cluttered thoughts. Roy didn’t know how his already complicated life had tangled into the mess it was today; he’d stretched himself too thin and now he was reaching even further, all for the sake of a young man he barely even knew.

Roy knew one thing, though: now that Alphonse had shown signs of magic, that firmly shoved him within Roy’s purview.

At least Roy thought Alphonse had shown signs of a magical signature, but the reason for Roy’s conviction now slid through his fingers, oil slick. With a frustrated sigh, he scanned the notes he’d taken while talking to Alphonse. _Flash of gold at neck, gold discharge in alchemical reaction, static shock between palms..._

Roy didn’t remember any of that. Had exhaustion really taken that much of a toll on his memory?

Roy tugged out his phone and punched in the direct number to his office. It rang only once.

 _“Hello, you’ve reached Central City Police Department, Division of Magic. This is officer Ross speaking, how may I be of assistance?_ ”  
  
“At least you answer the phone professionally,” Roy said in way of greeting. Ross laughed.

“ _Someone has to. What can I do for you?_ ”

“I am going to run a bit late this morning. Is Havoc around?”  
  
“ _Roger that. I believe so—Breda, do you know where Havoc is?”_ There was a brief pause and Roy barely made out Breda answering that Havoc was out for a smoke. “ _He’s outside, want Breda to go grab him?”_

“No, that is fine. I will talk to him when I get into the office. I should not be more than an hour.”

“ _Yes, sir. See you then._ ”

Roy ended the call and stood up, stretching his arms above his head until his back gave a satisfying crack as the sounds of students filling the hallways between classes filtered into his room. He needed a cup of coffee and a moment to reorganize his brain before heading over to the office—with students now rushing between classes, Roy reasoned a stop off at a cafe away from campus would save him the most frustration. Decision made, Roy gathered the paper phoenix from the table and placed it gently into his bag.

The hallway was packed as Roy slipped out of his classroom, which cemented his decision to go somewhere other than Central Perk. However, when he caught a glimpse of gold as he finished locking his classroom, he wavered. Roy watched as Ed trudged down the hallway looking exhausted and Roy debated the wisdom of what he was about to do, but his sympathy and respect for the older Elric had doubled over the course of his conversation with Alphonse.

“Edward!” Edward startled and glanced around the crowd of students for the source of his name. Roy lifted a hand and Edward frowned, changing his course of movement.

“Whatcha want, Mustang?”

“Would you care to grab coffee with me? You look like you could use one and I am not quite ready to head over to my office.”

“Is that all I am to ya, an excuse to skip out on work?” Edward grinned and it surprised Roy to realize that he was joking.

“You caught me.”

“Well, if ya pay, I don’t really got any complaints. Lemme just check on Al, he wasn’t lookin’ so good earlier.”

“Yes, of course,” Roy said and swallowed the little glimmer of guilt as Edward pulled out his phone and quickly punched out a message to his brother. As they began to walk, Roy noticed it was the same model as his phone.

“You do not strike me as the kind of person to use something so outdated.”

“I’ve got pisspoor luck with technology,” Edward responded with a shrug. “Found older models are more reliable—they must’ve made ‘em sturdier or something.”

“They must,” Roy said, fishing out his own phone to show Edward. Edward groaned dramatically.

“Aw, c’mon, you just made this thing ten times less cool by owning it.”

“Did it ever count as cool to begin with?”

“Touché.” Edward’s screen lit up with an incoming message; whatever Alphonse responded with made Edward screw up his face with indignation. He quickly tapped out a response and shoved his phone into his pocket. “He says he’s fine.”

“That is certainly a relief,” Roy said and Edward nodded, barely looking convinced. He had left his hand in his pocket, obviously reluctant to disconnect from his phone and the connection it offered to his brother. Roy’s curiosity grew the more he interacted with the Elrics—their codependency and constant worry for each other hinted strongly at a shared trauma that continued to haunt them. It could just be Alphonse's illness hanging over the two of them like a blade, but what Alphonse said before left Roy certain there was more to it.

“I guess, but...” Edward answered, trailing off as they approached Central Perk. Sure enough, it was just as crowded as Roy anticipated, but a couple of tables remained open. Roy checked his watch.

“Would you like to grab a table or am I paying for a hit and run coffee break?”

Edward snorted and his hand finally came out of his pocket. “I _guess_ I can stand your company for a few minutes if I’m getting something outta it.”

“You are utterly charming.” Roy rolled his eyes as he situated himself in line. He caught sight of a familiar head of black hair and round glasses rushing about behind the counter. When Kain Fuery looked up, he waved at Roy before switching his attention to one of his coworkers. Roy turned back to Edward. “What would you like? I can order and you can claim one of the empty tables?”

“Yeah, okay.” Edward said craning his neck to look where Roy’s gaze had drifted, but Kain had already disappeared into the back room of the cafe. He rolled back on his heels and shifted his bag onto his other shoulder. “I just want black coffee, _no fuckin’ milk._ ”

Roy raised a brow in question but left that strangely emphatic request alone.“Is that it?”

“Yeah.” Edward shrugged and then added. “An inadvisably large amount.”

“It is your stomach lining.” Roy said shrugging.

“Damn right it is,” Edward said and then peeled away quickly from the line to snag the table a trio of chattering students were making their way to. They glared at him as he made it to the table first and he smiled back, all teeth as he unpacked his bag and spread his things out like a dog marking his territory.

“Roy, hello!” Kain had returned from the back room, one hand around a file and the other raised in a little wave. He smiled, but the crinkles at the corners of his eyes spoke of strain and his usually spiky black hair drooped at the ends.

“Hello, Kain.” Roy stepped forward as the line progressed and Kain mirrored him, handing the file over the pastry counter as he did. “What is this?”

“Vato’s analysis and theories on the recent uptick in recent incidents unrelated to my area of study.” Kain said and meant magical incidents unrelated to human users. “I was planning on running it by your office this afternoon, but it looks like you’ve saved me the trouble. There’ve been a lot of them. The incidents, I mean.”

Roy frowned. That was news to him. “What do you mean?”

“You haven’t noticed?” Kain asked and through the merit of his open expression alone, managed to keep the question uncondescending. As it were, Roy still found himself defensive.

“I am only ever here once a week, I have not had a chance to thoroughly examine the campus.”

“Well, I guess that’s why you have me and Vato.” It was Roy’s turn in line, but when the barista taking orders moved to ask for Roy’s, Kain waved them off with a sweet smile. The barista shrugged and moved on to the person behind Roy. The line had dwindled significantly as most students bypassed caffeine in favor of arriving on time to their next class. Kain fidgeted with the string of his apron. “Guess I should do my other job before I get yelled at. What can I get you?”

“A large flat white and the largest black coffee you can legally sell me.” Roy managed not to flinch when Kain fixed him with overly concerned eyes, but only just. How Kain managed to exude such pure, uncondescending concern continuously eluded Roy.

“...are you okay?”

“Far from it, but this is not all for me,” Roy said and pointed to where Edward sat, phone back out on the table and brow furrowed.

“That’s Edward Elric,” Kain said with something a little like awe in his voice. He had always harbored a healthy respect for alchemists, even the ones that previously made Roy’s life difficult. “Why is he with you though? Doesn’t he hate you?”

“I really have no idea,” Roy said and Kain laughed, some of the strain around his eyes briefly disappearing as he did.

“That’s fair. Well, better not keep him waiting.” Kain said as Roy approached the register to pay. “Oh, Vato said to call him if you had any questions, by the way.”

“I doubt I will, he is meticulous.”

“Very true!” Kain said as Roy stepped out of the way to wait for his order. Kain hesitated for a moment, stepped to the side as if to return to his previous post and then stopped. “Um, Roy?”

“Yes?”

“It’s not really my place and I don’t mean to offend, but um...I think you should maybe take a break? Caffeine can’t substitute for a good night’s sleep, and you look like you might need one.”

Roy grimaced. “I will keep that in mind.”

Kain gave a little nod and then with a wave, returned to his position, leaving Roy to wait for his order and briefly scan through the report.

—

“Oh, thank fuck,” Ed said as Mustang returned to the table with their coffees in hand. Mustang snorted as he passed Ed a large paper cup, juggling the other cup with a thin folder held under one arm before setting them both on the table. He looked distracted, only half present as he pulled out the chair across from Ed and sank into it with an unfair amount of grace. Without thinking, Ed pointed to the file. “What’s that?”

Mustang hesitated, tapping long fingers against the plain folder before shrugging. “I have a colleague who keeps me updated on strange incidents around campus. This is his report.”

“Huh, detective or teacher related?” Ed took a sip of his coffee and hissed as it burnt his tongue. He immediately took another sip.

“Both.” Mustang shrugged when Ed favored him with a look, imploring clarification. Mustang obliged in the form of a question. “Have you noticed the faerie circles around campus?”

“Oh, fuck me, not those stupid things,” Ed groaned and then flushed when Mustang’s sharp eyes focused on Ed in sudden interest. “Yeah, I’ve noticed ‘em. They’re all over campus and they’ve got Al fuckin’ worked up over nothin’. He nearly collapsed my throat trying to keep me from walking into one.”

“I thought your brother did not believe in that sort of thing?”

“He doesn’t!” Ed snapped and then sighed through his nose. “Well, he didn’t, but Ling’s been fillin’ his head with stories and there’ve been a lot of those things around to validate that idiot’s fuckin’ faerie tales.”

Mustang hummed thoughtfully, sipping at his drink as he listened to Ed. Around them the cafe quieted steadily as students settled into studying. Ed fidgeted for a moment and then continued speaking. 

“I think it’s gettin’ to Al ‘cause he’s desperate for something positive, and magic looks like a pretty fuckin’ shiny panacea to the desperate.” Ed had meant his words to come out scathing, but he missed the mark by a mile; instead he sounded self-deprecating and bitter. He swallowed more coffee, hiding behind the cup. “Faeries don’t sound so great, but a ruleless power source sure fuckin’ does.”

“Magic is not without rules,” Mustang said after a moment, voice slow and careful. “It cannot create something from nothing, it is not without its pitfalls. Magic pulls energy from the earth just like alchemy, and we have rebounds as well. Not like yours, mind. Backlash for magic users comes from high emotions. Equivalent exchange is not just for alchemists.”

“Huh.” Ed scratched his chin as he fought his initial, knee-jerk reaction to impulsively reject Mustang’s words out of hand; instead he contemplated them. Not wanting to upset the tenuous conversational balance they had struck, Ed returned them to the topic before. “Why’d ya wunna know about the faerie circles?”

Mustang let the awkward conversation shift slide. “I appear to be the only person on campus who has not seen a single one.”

“For real? I’ve seen like six in the past month.”

“ _Six?_ ” Mustang demanded, drink forgotten on the way to his mouth.

“Yeah,” Ed replied, dragging out the word. “Give or take. Y’know, aside from all the bullshit superstition tacked onto ‘em, they’re pretty cool to look at. Nature’s fuckin’ weird.” Ed picked up his phone from where it rested on the table. He spun it between the fingers of his flesh hand and then dropped it into his lap where he would feel any alerts.

“Do you not find it strange that so many have shown up?” Mustang shifted in his seat and the hand not wrapped around his cup spread across the top of the folder and then curled into a loose fist. He flexed his hand again and drummed his fingers once. “An abundance of them growing in this area is unusual.”

“Really? I always thought they were pretty normal—I saw ‘em everywhere back home, even outside of fall.” Ed watched Mustang’s hand, mapping the transmutation circle inked into the skin as it undulated over shifting tendons. It was simple, but something struck him as strange about its composition. The lines were subtly wrong, the salamander an odd shape. “That’s not a transmutation circle?”

Mustang glanced down at his hand. “No, it is not.”

“Then how the fuck do you—” Ed stopped himself at the look Mustang had leveled on him and he rubbed at the back of his neck. “—you’re gunna say magic and we’re gunna start arguing, so I might as well not ask, yeah?”

“I would say that is a well-informed assumption,” Mustang said but his thin lips curled at the corners, hinting at amusement. “I never thought you were capable of tact.”

“Doesn’t look like you are.”

“Fair.” Mustang glanced down at his wristwatch and then cursed. “And on that note, I am going to be spectacularly late, so I really must take my leave.”

“Looks like I finally chased ya off.” Ed said, blithe to cover up the weird disappointment stirring under his skin.

“You did no such thing.” Mustang stood and placed his bag into the seat he’d just vacated, unzipping it so that he could slide the file into place beside several other folders and the corner of what looked like intricate origami. When he zipped his bag back together, he looked ready to hoist it up and depart without another word, but as he slowly situated the bag’s strap on his shoulder, he visibly came to a decision. “I want to ask—although I may regret it—why is it so terrible for your brother to pursue an interest in magic?”

“Where the fuck did that come from?” Ed demanded, but Mustang only stared down at him with an unreadable expression, waiting for an answer. Ed bit his tongue and thought about it.

“Because it’ll give ‘im false hope,” Ed said after a moment and really meant _us_. “And hope’s a terrible thing, Mustang. It makes failure that must more painful and he’s had enough pain to last a lifetime.”

“Yes, but it could be that it is not a false hope.”

“Everything is a false hope, especially magic,” Ed snapped and then made a dramatic shooing gesture with his hands, trying to soften the bite. “Now piss off before I fuck up a perfectly civil conversation.”

Mustang nodded, conceding the point. “For the sake of a civil conversation. Until next time.”

“Tuesday, then, yeah?” Ed said before he could stop himself. Mustang looked about as surprised as Ed felt.

“Tuesday.” Mustang agreed and then waved his farewell. Ed watched him the whole way, only slightly mortified that his eyes never lifted above hip level until the cafe doors shut behind Mustang. Who was there to witness it, anyway?

—

Ling spent far too much time following after the Elrics. He’d never meant to get so involved in their lives, yet here he was. Involved.

So that was why Ling found Al with his head on his desk and his arms wrapped around his stomach. A few of his fellow labmates glanced their way surreptitiously, concerned. How long had he been like that?

“Al?” Ling asked, tentatively touching Al’s shoulder. His shoulder blade was an unforgiving plane beneath Ling’s fingertips.

“Don’t mind me, ‘m fine.” Al didn’t move, speaking directly into his desk.

“Yeah, you look fine. Think you can sit up for me?”

“Was just restin’ my eyes,” Al slurred. He shifted and then with a visible effort, he pushed himself up. His gaze, when it met Ling’s, was glazed and unfocused. “Wassup?”

“You should be at home.”

“‘M _fine,_ ” Al said again and then frowned. “Just a little tired. Felt fine earlier, though, when I saw Mage Mustang.”

“When was that?”

“Uh…” Al rolled his head toward the wall clock and squinted. “I dunno, an hour or so ago?”

“Have you been sleeping here this whole time?”

“Don’ think so.” Al slumped back into his seat, legs sprawling as he sank low. Ling furrowed his brow, concern increasing at Al’s uncertainty. The lack of decorum rang alarm bells as well. “Can’t remember... Brother texted? Must’ve been awake then.”

“I’m going to take you home. Let me see your phone. I can let Ed know.”

Al straightened in his seat with a visible effort, hands gripping the armrests of his chair for support. “Don’t tell ‘im, he’ll just worry.” He reached for the computer mouse and the desktop’s screen flashed to life, washing out Al’s already pale face with the sudden light. Al’s movements stalled and he stared at the screen, a little lost. “I’ll stay here, just gimme a moment to wake up. I’ve a lot to do.”

“You’re not going to get anything done in this state. And I’m not keeping this from Ed,” Ling said, firm but gentle.

“Al, it’s really okay,” a mousy haired girl said from the workspace across from them. “We’ve got you covered here. Just send us your part of the project through the shared drive when you can.”

Al continued to hesitate. “But I already cause you—”

“I don’t want to hear that, you’re the reason we’re getting anywhere with this nightmare project as it is,” she said with a soft smile. “Go sleep, ‘kay?”

The last of Al’s resolve wavered and then crumbled; he gave a little nod to Ling’s relief and Ling immediately fished out his bulky phone to quickly tap out a message to Lan Fan. Al tried to stand and staggered against the desk. “Alright. Yeah, I think...sleep is good—I’ll send in my part as soon as I can, promise.”

“I believe you, now go home.”

—

When Ed returned home, he was greeted by Ling and a hacking cough.

“So I’m going to preface this in the worst way possible,” Ling said with a tight smile. “But don’t freak out.”

Ed’s heart immediately started to race and he pushed past Ling without a word. Al lay on the couch, curled on his side as he tried to suppress his coughing. He glanced up once and then directed tired eyes at the coffee table, shoulders heaving.

“What the hell, you told me you were fine!” Ed hissed, dropping his bag to the ground before approaching Al.

“Was fine.” Al mumbled, voice cough-coarse and weak. “Now’m not.”

“Why the fuck didn’t you call me?” Ed tried to keep his voice quiet, he really did, but panic tore at his self control.

“Ed...” Ling started but Al cut over him, muttering irritably at the floor, “Because I knew you’d lose your cool, Brother.”

“Excuse me for fuckin’ caring!”

“Ed, that’s not helping.” Lan Fan said as she poked her head out of the kitchen. Ed hadn’t know she was there. He really hadn’t cared. He ignored her. Al struggled to sit up, but when Ling and Ed both moved to help, Al glared at them, eyes flashing.

“You know what?” Al said when he’d managed to right himself. “No. I’ve had enough of this. I’m not grateful for your worrying, I’m not! So stop it and live your own life. Stop focusing on mine!”

“I fuckin’ can’t, I have to find a way to—”

“If you say fix me I swear I’m gunna lose it!” Al shouted as loud as his ruined throat allowed. Ed froze, skin going cold and then hot with sudden anxiety. “You can’t fix me and you damn well know it!”

A breath of silence stretched into several as the panic—and the anger that came with it—drained from Ed’s veins. A frozen numbness took up residence in its absence, fragile but all encompassing “Ah.”

“Wait, no, that’s not what I—”

“No, it’s okay,” Ed said and he was proud that his voice didn’t waver, but something inside his chest had started to crack and he wasn’t sure it would stop before there was nothing left of him but pieces. _You’re a_ _failure! Look, you’ve failed! You’ve failed Al!_ circled the confines of his skull, loud now that what he’d always thought had been given voice. The numbness started to fade just as quickly as it’d set in and Ed hastily grabbed his bag from where he’d dropped it. Without a word, he turned on his heel and brushed past Ling.

“Brother, wait!”

Edward didn’t listen, yanking open the front door and not bothering to shut it behind him as he ran, trying not to shatter.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The dark tag starts pulling its weight here.
> 
> Edit: THIS IS NOW MY LONGEST WORK I'VE DONE FOR FANDOM AND I'M SO EXCITED LET ME SCREAM AT YOU!!
> 
> I DID ARTWORK FOR THE CHAPTER AS WELL IN CELEBRATION...well, I was doing it anyways, but it worked out! I hope you enjoy~

Ed didn’t drink often; when he did, he drank hard.

Bars were too loud; too many nosy, handsy people to compete with for breathing space. Restaurants were not the place to drink past a couple glasses of wine. Clubs were simply the worst. So instead, Ed sat in a quiet, empty park under a molting tree with a bottle of something hard and awful between his knees. Leaves crunched beneath him everytime he moved. Mushrooms, blessedly without any geometrical aspirations, glowed bright in the light of the slivered moon. In the cold, Ed felt warm and without balance.

As the moon climbed and Ed’s bottle slowly emptied, the soft sounds of footsteps tugged him from the buzzing of his alcohol-numbed brain. He looked up and for a moment the moon made a silhouette of the man standing over him. He shifted, allowing silver light to bathe sharp features. Somehow he always found Ed.

Ling sat down next to him. Didn’t say a word. Ed quietly kept drinking until his vision blurred. He blinked, rubbed at his eyes and they came away wet. Huh, strange. He succumbed to gravity, sliding bonelessly across the tree trunk, bark catching on his coat. His slow collapse halted against Ling’s side. A warm arm wrapped around Ed’s shoulders. A long fingered hand took the bottle. Ed didn’t protest.

Embarrassment would make him sharp in the morning, but for now Ed let himself take comfort in the warmth and the silence.

—

“The number of unreported disappearances has doubled.” Maes poked about Roy’s small kitchen as he spoke. So far he’d surveyed all of Roy’s serveware and turned his nose up at Roy’s tea collection. He did this every time he visited, physically incapable of sitting still. “And nobody’s asking questions.”

Roy cursed. “Are you sure?”

Maes stopped his search of Roy’s pantry so that he could glare at Roy. “Are you doubting me?”

“...No?” Roy leaned forward against the counter separating his kitchen from his living room. “But I would certainly like for you to be wrong.”

“Not how the world works, Roy Boy.” Maes laughed when Roy scrunched up his face at him, but then sobered on the next breath. “It’s strange. I’d like to think I’d have noticed the pattern before I met Riza and you, but…” He shrugged, staring sightless at the few contents in Roy’s pantry. When he glanced back up at Roy, he grinned, glasses flashing in the florescent light. “Nah, I’d definitely have noticed it. I’m too good.”

“You’re insufferable.”

“Yeah, but you like me anyway.” Maes stood on tiptoe to grab something from the top shelf and then settled back onto his heels, hands around a bottle of whiskey. “How many of these do you have around the house?”

Roy raised an eyebrow at him. “Are you admitting that you don’t know?”

“Your house is basically a surveillance deadzone,” Maes whined, slouching as he walked to the sink. He grabbed two mugs from the cupboard above it and filled them. “And you’re surprisingly sneaky. Means I have to do all my snooping in person. It’s  _terrible_.”

“Boo-hoo, you can’t remotely invade my privacy, how awful,” Roy deadpanned, avoiding a direct answer. He took the mug Maes offered him and then clinked it against Maes’, sipped at it, and placed it on the counter with a thud. The burn of cheap whiskey crawled down his throat, the warmth creating a wall against everything building beneath his ribcage and within his skull.

“It’s a travesty!” Maes dropped into the seat next to Roy and placed his elbows on the counter, whiskey cupped in his hands like a mug of warm tea. “But it makes your house a great place for illicit conversation.”

“I only started taking precautions after I met you, you nosy bastard,” Roy said and took another swallow of his drink. Maes and privacy mixed about as well as Edward and magic, a fact Roy learned the first time he ever let Maes into his apartment; the next day Roy had discovered a voice activated recorder taped conspicuously to the leg of his livingroom coffee table and a matching camera by the bookshelf. Not long after that Roy started warding his house against advanced technology, manually sweeping for the rest. “And it’s not a flawless system.”

“It’s as close as we’re going to get,” Maes said and then promptly returned them to their earlier topic. “What do you think they mean?”

“The disappearances?” Maes nodded and Roy scratched at the side of his face, thinking. “Nothing good. According to Vato, there’ve been an abnormal number of faerie circles cropping up on campus. We haven’t had anyone reported missing yet, but if these circles were mundane, I definitely would’ve seen one.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because they’ve mostly been around the Alchemy Complex and I’m there every Tuesday for my lecture. I suppose they could grow on Wednesday and rot away by Monday but that seems—”

“Unlikely, right,” Maes finished for him. “I won’t pretend to understand what that means—that’s your area of freaky expertise—but in combination with those disappearances—”

“And Nina’s—”

“And Nina’s,” Maes conceded. “I think it would foolhardy to write it off as a coincidence.”

“You don’t have to tell me that.” Roy moved his mug and then dropped his forehead against the counter with a dull smack. “I don’t know what that means, though. Yao hasn’t said anything, but I believe he’s rather involved with the Elrics as of late, so he may not have noticed.”

“As you’d like to be.”

Roy didn’t engage, he _wouldn’t_ engage. He knew better than to encourage Maes.

“Though I suppose it’s really only one Elric you’d like to involve yourself with,” Maes mused, reminding Roy that he needed no encouragement at all. “How is that delightful firecracker?”

“...”

“Ah...so you’ve met with him recently, then.” Roy could hear the eyebrow waggle in Maes’ voice.

“I really hate you.”

“You’re just too easy to read. So, you’ve met with him?”

“You’re the only person who’s ever said that to me,” Roy muttered, pride wounded. “But yes, I have. And his brother.”

“How scandalous!”

“Shut up, that’s not what I meant.” Roy finally raised his head and reached for his mug, swallowing the rest of his whiskey with a pointed look at Maes. Maes grinned. “Alphonse approached me for assistance a few weeks ago with his independent research.”

“Magic related, I’d assume? Aren’t the Elrics nonbelievers?”

“That’s the thing!” Roy leaned over the counter and retrieved the bottle Maes had left within reach. “Alphonse isn’t completely uncompromising, but when faced with magic head on he completely denies its existence. It’s Edward who staunchly rejects it. But even then—” Roy sat back down and tipped three fingers’ worth of whiskey into his mug. Placing his palms against each side of the porcelain, he willed heat from the liquid. It left him short a breath or two, but that beat standing up to grab ice from the freezer. “—he was civil yesterday, or as civil as he’s capable of being. But there’s something there that I can’t put my finger on.”

“I’m sure he’d let you put your fingers all over him if you asked nicely,” Maes said, snatching the whiskey bottle from Roy. Roy waited until Maes had poured a healthy dose into his mug before snapping his fingers. Maes yelped as steam billowed into his face and then coughed on the fumes. He scowled at Roy as he wiped condensation from his glasses. “ _What?_ I’m just saying you should get on that while you have the chance—I’m straight not blind: that young man is gorgeous, if all the staring you did at the restaurant is—”

Roy drummed his fingers hard against the counter, drawing Maes attention. He raised his right hand directly between their faces and pressed his middle finger to his thumb, glaring down his meddling friend. He didn’t need Maes to spin out some fanciful scheme to coax Edward into Roy’s bed (or, truer to form, before an altar exchanging vows, tacky romantic that Maes was) when they had very real issues to discuss. Besides, if Roy had wanted to die at the hands of something pretty, he would have stayed in Faerie.

“Spoilsport,” Maes muttered under his breath. Roy kept his fingers poised to snap. Maes sighed, relenting. “Alright, fine, I’ll shut up.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it.”

“Don’t you mean _hear_ it?”

Roy stared at Maes and Maes pressed his lips together, chagrined. He held out his mug. “Point proven, now can you cool this off?”

“Sure.” Roy took it from him and held it captive, taking his time to syphon out the heat. “I don’t have any idea what’s going on—not with your disappearances or mine, not with the sudden uptick in activity on campus and certainly not with the Elrics. But I have a terrible feeling it’s all related.”

“I, for one, am going to trust your feeling,” Maes said, all teasing chased from his features. “You haven’t been wrong yet.”

Roy replied grimly. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

—

_Ed went home, wrung out and unsteady on his feet. He woke up in the afternoon to an empty house and decided it was the best outcome he could have hoped for. He would remain in his room until his stomach stopped turning and its contents ceased their revolt. He would eat, he would reorganize his thoughts into a shape that didn’t resemble a shattered vase. He would..._

_He fell back into an uneasy sleep after managing only a glass of water._

_He dreamed._

_Mushrooms towered like trees around him.Their fibrous stalks were spongy to the touch, ribbed deeply and irregularly so that the pearly-pink light of the moon created shadows like ink-spills in the crevices. The grass at his feet crunched loudly as he walked but the blades stretched no taller than soles of his boots._

_An extra set of footsteps echoed beside him; he turned his head and Al smiled back at him, cheeks chubby with puppy-fat._

_“Look, Brother, isn’t it neat?” He said and pointed at the canopy of mushrooms where their gilled underbellies created black shadows against violently red and orange caps. Al’s skin glowed in the moonlight, his veins bright and gold beneath his skin. Ed glanced at his own hands and they were fully flesh, small like Al’s and alive with his golden blood._

_For a moment he stared, enthralled._

_The lines in his right palm cracked open. The moonlight cracked with it, flooding around him, dim and purple and stretching the shadows out in jagged, uncertain lines. He didn’t scream as the flesh of his right arm melted away from its automail core; the wet slap of liquid skin and fat echoed in his ears, a dull drumming against the ground like slow and heavy rain. The gore stained the shadows gold._

_“Brother, I want to wake up.” Ed turned towards the voice, but Al was no longer standing next to him. He turned on his heel and slipped in the puddle at his feet, landing on his back with a thud when his balance failed him. His skull cracked against the cold ground and his vision blurred, wiping away the strange storybook landscape and replacing it with a plain white ceiling._

“I want to wake up.”

_Ed heard it again but he couldn’t move to chase the sound. Leaning over him was his own worried face, shattered with grief. His other self was crying silently, gesturing down at where Ed lay. Movement out of the corner of his eye caught his attention and then Winry slid into view, just as wrecked. They were speaking, Ed couldn’t hear them. Like the wrong audio file over an online video, a constant loop of Al’s panicked voice filtered through Ed’s ears:_

“I want to wake up. Brother, I want to wake up! Save me, I want to—I need to wake up! Please, oh god please SAVE ME!”

Ed woke slowly to early sunlight seeping into his room, his eyes stinging and clueless as to why.

—

Anemone did not bloom in the fall, and rarely at all in Central. Yet a single, tenacious stem pierced through the frost-hardened ground. Against the wealth of fallen leaves, its red petals unfurled beneath the sunlight.

Red like blood, red like fall, red like anticipation.

Its warning went unnoticed.

—

On Wednesday night, Ed finally stumbled from his room.

Al sat at the kitchen table, his hands wound tightly together and his bottom lip worried between his teeth. He looked up at Ed, untangled his hands and surged to his feet, tugging Ed to him in a desperate hug before Ed could even piece together how he wanted to face him.

“I didn’t mean it.” Al whispered and he felt so cold to Ed’s touch, but his hold was firm. “Not the way it came out. I kept checking up on you, but I didn’t want to wake you so I’ve been waiting and—I didn’t meant it.”

“It’s okay.”

“No, it’s really not.” Al pushed back from Ed, but his fingers remained gripped around Ed’s forearms, preventing potential escape. Al bit his lip, worrying it again as he thought about what to say and Ed’s stomach clenched. “Brother, you’ve done so much for me and I—”

“Doctor Curtis’ll kill me if I don’t meet with her today,” Ed said and didn’t meet Al’s eyes. “I’m gunna see if I can catch her while she’s still in her office. Will you be alright?”

“Brother, I—” Al dipped his head but when Ed still didn’t meet his eyes, he sighed. “Yeah, I’ll be fine.”

“Thanks.” Ed gave Al a squeeze and then extricated himself, guilty over the time he’d wasted moping. He’d spend the night in the library to make up for it.

—

Blank, sunken eyes stared up at the slivered moon, empty of all expression. The evening had aged past when most students would bother roaming around campus, but a young couple searching for a quiet corner tripped over board-stiff legs and tumbled down beside the body. They burst into drunken laughter.

“Sorry, man, didn’t see you—woah.” One of the girls pressed a hand to the pale face, finding it cold and bloodless beneath her fingers. Her partner scrambled to her knees, but stayed behind the back of her companion.

“Is... is it real?”

“No way, it’s gotta just be a prank, right? It’s almost Halloween, but, like, this is some next level realism.” The fingers pressed against the pale cheek explored, brushing against cheekbones and through cracking trails of black. When they slipped past chapped lips, they stilled for a single moment and then with a gasp she jerked her hand back, voice shaking. “It’s real.”

“What?”

“It’s real. Fuck, it’s real. Call the police.”

“How do you know, it could just—”

“Saliva, there’s saliva—just call the—” She gagged, barely managing to move far enough away to miss the corpse before she vomited. Her partner pulled out a phone, smacking it against her palm when the screen flicked and then she dialed the police with shaking fingers.

—

“You’ve been distracted lately.” Dr. Curtis stood over Ed where he sat at his cramped desk, her feet spread wide to discourage escape. Ed wouldn’t dare try, he’d never met a stronger person in his life; getting flipped into the linoleum floor was just what he _didn’t_ need. So Ed bowed his head beneath the heavy observation of his mentor and shrugged. While he had told Al he was coming to check in with Dr. Curtis, he’d honestly hoped she’d have already turned in for the night and he would have full reign of the Alchemy labs unnoticed. He should have known better, luck had never been on his side like that.

“Edward, look at me.”

Ed did, slowly, unsurprised when Dr. Curtis’s face gave nothing away, stern and dark and sharp. Suddenly her eyes softened, but the set of her mouth remained hard. Ed looked away again, feeling distinctly like a chastised child even though she had yet to do any such thing.

“Have you been sleeping?”

Ed shrugged again and turned the page of the Cretan medical text he had open before him. One of Al’s books. She reached down and shut it, forcing him to glance back up with a glare. If any other person aside from Al had tried that, he’d have bitten them. “A bit, ma’am.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“S’not a lie,” Ed said but even to his own ears his voice sounded ragged, bordering on defeated. “Not exactly. I sleep sometimes.”

“If teaching is too much for you, I can—”  
  
“No!” Ed snapped and then flushed, immediately curling back into himself. Filtering in from somewhere outside, the muffled wail of sirens layered over Ed’s next mumbled words. “I mean, if ya think I’m not up to it, then yeah, okay I—”

“Edward, I never would’ve let you teach in my department if I thought you weren’t up to it,” she said gruffly but not unkindly. She placed a hand on his shoulder and dipped her head down, trying to catch Ed’s averted eyes. “But something’s eating at you. You know you can always come to me if—what’s all that noise?”

The wailing spiked, red and blue lights fighting the fluorescent lights of the lab for dominance as they flooded in through the window. As suddenly as they started, the sirens silenced, leaving only the eerie dancing of police lights. Ed shared a confused look with Dr. Curtis and then stood up, cautiously approaching the window. Between the flashing and the glare created by the bright lights overhead, Ed could barely make out more than the vague swarming of officers and students alike.

“Can’t see nothin’, shut off the main lights.” Ed said and then remembering who he was talking to he tacked on a quick, “Please?”

Dr. Curtis snorted and obliged, shutting down the lab lights with a series of clicks. It took a moment for Ed’s eyes to adjust, but when they did he could see several officers pushing back a small crowd of bystanders from a dark shape on the ground. Lights brushed across it, illuminating the shape of legs, a torso, a face too far away to make out the features. Ed cursed.

“Someone’s on the ground, not fuckin’ moving.” Ed swallowed and Dr. Curtis matched his curse with one of her own and pressed a hand to the glass.

“How do you know? I can’t see a thing, we’re too far away.”

“Maybe yer just getting old,” Ed quipped, voice weak. The crowd below undulated nervously, and several figures approached from the shadows. Ed squinted. “Something’s happening—Wait, is that the fuckin’ military?”

“What the hell are they doing on campus?” Dr. Curtis hissed and Ed shook his head, just as much at a loss as his mentor. The crowd dispersed quickly, leaving only the police, the four people in military dress and what looked like two young women huddled close together and holding hands. The last two were now the focus of everyone’s attention.

“Fuck if I know. Whatever it is, we’ll be the last to find out.”

Dr. Curtis nodded sharply, mouth pursed. She rounded on Ed, jabbing a finger at his nose. “Don’t think this’s distracted me from your brooding. You come to me if you’re in trouble, you here?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Ed yelped, falling back a step.

She searched his face, eyes narrowed as she checked him over for falsehoods. Apparently satisfied, she nodded again and lowered her hand. “Good. I’m not against using force to drag you out of the labs, you know. I care about you, kid.”

Ed swallowed around the sudden tightness in his throat but managed a wobbly smile in thanks. Dr. Curtis didn’t push, clapping his flesh shoulder once before turning on her heel and stalking off to her office. Ed made his own way back to his desk, sat down, and did nothing but breath for a long while.

—

 _“Hey, Roy!”_ Roy pulled the phone receiver away from his ear with a grimace. Why Maes insisted on shouting everything, especially so early on a Thursday morning, was beyond him. _“How are ya, buddy?”_

“What have I said about calling me at work?” Roy leaned back in his desk chair and glanced about his small office. Of the three other desks, only Ross’s was occupied, as Breda and Havoc had a late start that day, and it left the room oddly empty. The singular window across the room filtered in clear, autumn sunlight through the sheer curtains. The light glinted off an array of coffee mugs, paper cups and pens scattered around the room. Havoc had a pyramid going on his desk; Roy would have to deal with that later.

 _“I know, I know, but this is really interesting, I_ promise _.”_ Roy perked up and listened closely as Maes said in the gossipy tones of someone with nothing important to say. _“You know what we talked about earlier? There are some major updates, can you believe it? Totally took me by surprise.”_

“Oh, really?” Roy forced his voice flat and blandly interested even as his nerves sang with dread.

_“You haven’t heard? Thought you’d be the first to know, to be honest.”_

Roy scrambled for a pen and scribbled down _check the news, campus_ and shook the paper at Ross. She looked up and squinted at his loopy scrawl, even standing up to get a better look. Roy huffed, and quickly folded it into a crude airplane, sending it across the room in a small effort of will. Ross snatched it out of the air, dropped back into her seat with a nod and began to type.

“I had no idea.” Roy replied. Quicker than Roy expected, Ross lifted her own memo, this one penned in thick, easy-to-see lines for Roy to read: _police & military on campus, no details. _

_“Well, damn, looks like you’ll have to wait a bit for the details. Let’s have lunch. Don’t eat before we meet.”_

“Would not dream of it.”

—

It wasn’t Maes who met Roy at his office, but Riza with a visitor’s pass around her neck. Ross looked up and beamed. “Riza, hello!”

Riza smiled back, a tiny, warm quirk of her lips. “Hello, Maria. I hope you’ve been well.”

“Since my boss is right over there, I’m obligated to say yes,” she responded brightly. Roy frowned at her and she laughed. “Oh no, he’s glaring! Would it help if I said it’s true?”

“Not that I am not happy to see you, Riza—” Roy said, eyebrow raised at Ross. She flashed him a quick grin and went back to her work. Riza turned her attention on Roy, the smile dropping gradually as her face settled into its usual impassiveness. Roy tapped the paperwork scattered across his desk into something like order and set it aside as he continued. “—but I was expecting someone far more annoying.”

“You’ll just have to suffer through it, sir,” She said as she approached his desk. She was out of uniform, long blonde hair free from its usual severe bun and resting to frame the open neck of her white blouse; the silver chain and small pendant she always wore shimmered on display against her collarbones. She would look harmless to anyone who didn’t know of the weapons she kept hidden under her brown coat or in the ankles of her short boots. As she grew closer to his desk the edges of her expression revealed a deep exhaustion that a thin layer of makeup barely hid. “Would you care if we didn’t go out, I’d prefer to relax away from people.”

“What do you propose?” Roy asked, superficially pleasant yet quietly alarmed. Riza shifted her shoulder bag and pulled out a couple of wrapped sandwiches in answer. It looked like they would be eating in his car. “Ah, very well then. Ross, I will be taking my lunch break a little early. Can you handle the office alone for a bit?”

“You got it, sir,” she said cheerfully enough but obviously perplexed by Roy and Riza’s silent communication. “Do you mind if I take mine as soon as Havoc or Breda get in?”

“Not at all. Call my cell if you run into any issues.”

With that, Roy gathered his phone from his desk and coat from the back of his chair. Riza waited in a loose parade-rest, amber eyes following his path as he tried to move quickly. She fell into step behind him once he’d shrugged on his coat and started for the door; her military training and a deep-seated need to always watch his back when they were together kept her from walking even with him. He slowed as they stepped through the hallway between his office space and the rest of the precinct. She slowed as well and continued to do so until they were stopped and Roy had to turn so that he could face her, frowning. Riza stared placidly back at him.

“It feels like you’re my secretary when you do that,” he hissed and she shrugged, unmoving.

“Too bad, sir.”

“And when you call me that.”

“Once again, too bad, sir.” Her expression didn’t change, but Roy swore he saw a tired twinkle of mischief light up her eyes, before it petered out. “Now, if you don’t mind, I would actually like to enjoy the rest of my day off.”

“By all means,” he said, gesturing grandly in front of him. She raised a brow at him, going so far as to cross her arms over her chest in stubborn denial of his request. He huffed, let his hand drop. “I acknowledge this is a losing battle, but will you ever just walk at my side?”

“Maybe one day, sir,” she replied and this time the shine in her eyes lit up something dark and sorrowful in her, something Roy never wanted to grow used to seeing. “But not today, so go.”

He hesitated a moment longer before conceding to her. He pushed open the door, holding it only as long as it took for her to take the weight from him. He strode forward through the cluster of cubicles between him and the exit. She followed behind, checking herself out and handing over her visitors pass to the secretary at the front desk as Roy waited for her at the door.

The air outside stung his skin, cooler than he expected this time of year. A couple of officers huddled together by the designated smoking corner, backs to the chilly breeze stirring leaves against the sidewalk; one looked up and waved in greeting and Roy waved back. Sunlight glittered off the spattering of cars parked in the lot across from them. He and Riza headed towards them. “What do you have for me?”

Riza handed him a sandwich.

“Thank you, but I meant in terms of news.”

“Let’s get out of the cold first.”

They remained silent after that until they reached Roy’s two-door car. Despite its age, its black paint shone brightly in the early afternoon sunlight and the silver horse, posed mid-canter right in the center of the front grill, winked at them as they approached. Roy tugged his keys from his coat pocket and manually unlocked the driver’s side door before popping the other lock. Riza circled around to the passenger’s side and slid in.

“Okay, now will you talk to me?”  
  
Riza smiled at him, tugged out her own sandwich and unwrapped it slowly. She took a bite, swallowed and then, right before Roy snatched the damn thing from her and held it hostage, she finally spoke.

“There was a death on campus,” she said, all traces of teasing gone in a flash. She rifled through her purse as she spoke, pulling out a slim manila folder that she handed over to Roy. “A student, as far as we can tell. Normally CPD would have control of this case, but we stepped in and claimed jurisdiction. Maes is still trying to get an ID, but as of right now we’ve only got what’s in that folder.”

“Why would the military claim jurisdiction on a student’s death?” Roy mused, flipping open the file and browsing quickly through the pages as he distractedly spoke. “Maes said it was probably related to the disappearances on the phone—do you know why?”

Riza shook her head and swallowed another bite of her sandwich. “He didn’t want to say until he had more information. Right now, he’s not sure it _is_ related, but we both think the level of hush-hush around this death is rather disconcerting.”

“It is.” Roy agreed glancing up from the transcripted account the young girls who had discovered the body had given. After he had ended his call with Maes that morning, he’d done a little digging himself, his results the same as Ross’s: Police and military presence on campus, a gag order on two unnamed students seen on site and absolutely no information beyond that.

Riza eyed the unopened sandwich in Roy’s hand with exasperation. Roy started tearing it open, but he wasn’t the least bit hungry. Riza finished hers before saying, “Oh, Maes also expressly instructed me to say: ‘don’t let that curious pyromaniac poke his nose into this yet, not until I’m certain it’s up his alley.’”

“Why tell me about it to begin with?”

“Because warnings are always nice before things potentially fall apart, don’t you think?” Riza said and it sounded so much like Maes that Roy couldn’t tell if she was quoting at him or if she had just spent too much time around him as of late. “And if this is something within your purview, it’s better you are prepared for it.”

“I really hope it isn’t,” Roy said, closing the file before he could sort through the photographs—certain they would turn him off his lunch if he did so now. He placed it aside so that he could eat without potentially staining the pages and it promptly slipped between his seat and the center console, opening-side down. Roy cursed.

“Thanks,” Roy said when Riza fished it out, placing the file safely on her lap. The conversation wandered from there as Riza bullied Roy into eating and Roy teased her about her crush on his coworker: light hearted ribbing to stave off the chill of the coming storm

Unnoticed, a photograph nestled against the rough interior of the car. Kevin Stenson stared up at nothing, face washed out by a camera flash; anemone, like a silky pool of blood, bloomed around his head.

—

Roy’s phone rang as he was wrestling with the coffee pot, trying to convince it to produce something other than thick, bitter sludge. He would consume it if he had to, mind, because he needed the caffeine, but he would prefer something more…liquid if he could manage it.

With a final glare at the pot, Roy fished his phone from his pocket and pressed answer. “Detective Roy Mustang.”

_“Detective Mustang, hello. This is Shou Tucker.”_

Roy frowned at the breathy way Tucker spoke, his tone whisper gentle. It set Roy’s teeth on edge, but maybe that was the ever present guilt shading all of Roy’s interactions with the man. “Ah, hello, Mr. Tucker. How may I help you?”

 _“My Nina,”_ he said, and then sighed. _“My Nina, you don’t need to search for her anymore.”_

The sigh tilted ecstatic in opposition to the words spoken. The unease building in Roy’s stomach sharpened with confusion. “I assure you we are—”

 _“No, no, no,”_ Tucker breathed quickly. _“No, please, none of that Detective Mustang. I’m not saying you should quit looking because you have failed to turn anything up—I’m saying you should quit because there’s no reason to search for her anymore.”_

“I do not understand.”

_“She—my Nina, oh my perfect Nina—she came back to me.”_

Cold. So, so cold. Roy swallowed around the ice forming in his stomach. “Came back to you?”

_“Yes, she was out in the yard this morning where those beautiful flowers used to be.”_

“That is not—” Roy stopped himself. As the lead investigator on the Nina Tucker case, he shouldn’t outright state that finding her was an impossibility. At the very least, he would need to provide an explanation, which he simply could not do. Havoc stepped into the room as Roy swallowed down half a dozen alternate phrases and screwed his eyes closed. When Roy opened them Havoc mouthed _you okay?_ Roy shook his head and finally sighed. “Are you currently at home?”

“ _There’s no need—”_

“Mr. Tucker, we have to confirm the return of your daughter, at the very least, before we close her casefile. Word of mouth is unfortunately not sufficient.”  
  
_“Is that really necessary? She’s so tired. My Nina needs rest, Detective Mustang.”_

“It will only take a moment, I promise,” Roy said as smoothly as he could, even as the urge to clench his teeth ached along his jaw. “We have to confirm that she is in good health.”

 _“Yes, alright,”_ Tucker grudgingly conceded, the breathy sound of his excitement sharpened with quiet irritation; Roy imagined he heard trepidation as well, but there was no way to be sure without seeing Tucker’s face. _“But please be quick, she’s sleeping.”_  
  
“Of course, we will be there within the hour.”

Tucker hung up, not bothering with a farewell. Roy grit his teeth and made an unpleasant face at the screen, finding that a better alternative to setting it on fire with the magic starting to crackle in response to his tension.  
  
“Did I hear that right?” Havoc asked, holding out a mug to Roy. Roy could have kissed him, the coffee inside it actually looked liquid. Roy cradled the mug in his hands, sifting through all the possible ways and reasons Nina would return to the mortal realm—not a single one of them left hope that he would find her whole.

“Boss?”

Roy shook his head again but the thickening webs of anxiety refused to release him. “Depends on what you thought you heard.”

“That Nina’s back. The one you said we were never gunna find.” Havoc followed Roy out to their small office space.

“We _were_ never going to find her.” Roy was certain of that, but he never considered Nina being returned to them. It never happened.

“Look, I’m not doubting ya or anything, but maybe you were just wrong this time?”

Roy took a drink from his coffee nodded vaguely. “That is a nice thought.”

“It could happen,” Havoc continued and then sighed. “Lemme go with ya. You shouldn’t drive.”

“I am perfectly capable of driving a car on my own.” But that was all the fight Roy gave as Havoc snorted and grabbed his set of keys from his desk.

—

The stench of Faerie saturated the air around the Alchemy Complex. Ling nearly choked on it.

“What in Mab’s name?” He muttered to himself, circling around the building, momentarily distracted from his mission. Al had sent him to find Ed, who had once again refused to come home, making it two full days in a row since Wednesday. In a fit of research, Ed was known to camp out in either the library or the alchemy labs—stealing showers from the campus gym and meals from vending machines—but after their fight, Al was worried this stint tasted more of self-punishment than legitimate research. Ling agreed but Ed would have to wait until Ling found the source of blackberry flowers and summer currently prickling along his senses.

He found it at the base of a tree, a rash of flowers that reeked more of blood to his sensitive nose. X marks the spot, so to speak—but underneath the stench and the deeper, richer aroma of Faerie, Ling caught something else. It tickled at the back of his nose, aggravatingly familiar. His skin itched and it set his teeth on edge.

The flowers themselves were odd. Little bursts of red, centers black and yellow—the colors of flames and charcoal and ruin. They belonged to the spring, the early summer—not the chill that soaked the air.

And then it hit him, embarrassingly slowly. That stench of blood and something else—smoke and explosions and sweet gardens. Ling growled and changed course.

Roy, he had to warn Roy.

Ling took off at a sprint, phone out as he tried to ring Roy. Either his agitated state or the magic lambent in the air fucked with the connection and after a third unsuccessful attempt he gave up with a curse, concentrating solely on speed.

On a Friday, Roy would be at work, in his office, most likely. _Please be in your office_. He quickly closed the distance between campus and the precinct, long legs and a boost of magic eating the miles in a blink. He burst through the entrance doors of the precinct, skidding to a halt before the reception desk where a young secretary sat, wide-eyed and hands slack around his phone.

“I need to speak with Detective Mustang,” Ling panted at the secretary who blinked and slowly brought his eyes back to their normal size. Ling rolled his to the ceiling, sucking in a breath and then exhaling out with force. “Now would be awesome.”

“I’m sorry, but you’ve missed him by a few minutes. If you’d like, I could ring someone else from his office to assist you.”

Ling cursed his luck. “Who’s here?”

“I believe it’s just Officer Ross at the moment, sir.”

Ross didn’t know Ling and wouldn’t know to take him seriously. Havoc would’ve been best, but Breda had also been around during his and Ed’s constant trips in and out of the precinct (both together and separately). Ling needed to find Roy now.

“Can you leave her a message. Tell her if Detective Mustang comes back that he needs to contact Ling Yao immediately.”

“If you’re in trouble, sir, we have other officers who—”

“Just give her the damn message.”

Ling spun on his heel and rushed back out the front doors, not even the least bit sure where to begin looking. Damn Roy and damn his wardings. He tugged out his phone and tried again. Nothing.

He could wait. He could search. Only one of those actions guaranteed finding Roy at the end. With a curse—he was doing that a lot today—he decided to wait.

—

“This place is a mess.” Havoc muttered under his breath to Roy. “It’s like he’s never heard of a vacuum.”

“It was not like this a month ago.” Roy hissed back. His shoulders had crawled up to his ears the second they crossed the threshold into the Tucker household. Between the glassy sheen of Shou Tucker’s eyes and the thread of an aroma just beneath his senses’ abilities to recognize it, the unease that had gripped him earlier only grew in strength. They now followed Tucker deep into the house. “Something is not right.”

“She is still sleeping, so please keep your visit brief,” Tucker said as he stopped outside a closed door. “I would hate to disturb her rest, she has to’ve been through so much.”

“Of course, Mr. Tucker,” Havoc said, letting Roy keep his words trapped behind his teeth.

“Well then,” Tucker said and pushed the door open. Alexander was the first thing Roy saw, a large swathe of white stretched across the top of the small bed, blocking the occupant from view. The scent from before blossomed, striking Roy’s nose like a physical blow and he faltered.

“My Nina always has the most beautiful flowers around her,” Tucker said, stepping into the room ahead of Roy and Havoc. “When I found her in the backyard, she had these beautiful blooms in her braids. I’ve never seen them before, but they certainly suit her, don’t you think?”

Alexander didn’t stir when Roy finally approached the bed but he whined low in the back of his throat and Roy could almost imagine he was being implored to fix the little girl curled around Alexander’s nose. Her tiny hand curled and lay rested against Alexander and her face was slack and relaxed; if not for the flowers, she could have simply been asleep.

Two types of blooms stretched up from the mess of her fine hair, stalks shifting with Alexander’s every exhale. One type had wide, flat petals in dark purple and garnet, their centers thick and black and satiny; the other had sharp blossoms in periwinkle and lavender and wine accented in the center by yellow petals that almost resembled bells. The colors rioted for attention, gorgeous in their strangeness, but they were not woven into Nina’s hair, they were not simple cuts. Instead their roots bled into her scalp and slipped into the well of her visible ear, invading through her very pores.

“Jesus.” Havoc hissed under his breath, low enough that Roy almost missed it. Tucker knelt at the head of the bed and thread his fingers through Nina’s fringe, smile vacantly fond. Nina’s chest rose and fell with slow breath and her cheeks still held the slightest flush of pink but Roy held no hope that there remained anything left of Tucker’s Nina. Her magic was gone.

Roy swallowed and with an effort he forced his face completely blank. He approached the bed and reached out a finger to touch one of the sharp and belled flowers, one of the many lavender ones, and it reached back to him.

Columbine. And the wide-petaled flowers, anemone. Yet, beneath the overpowering scent of their blooms, Roy caught a hint of blackberry flowers and he swallowed again to keep from gagging.

“See? She’s only sleeping,” Tucker murmured, turning that vacant smile on Roy and Havoc. “You can close your case. She’s safe with me.”

“ _Jesus,_ ” Havoc said again, his voice pitching high as panic clogged his throat. Roy shot him a desperate _be quiet_ look over his shoulder—he didn’t think he could handle his own growing panic as well as Havoc’s. Roy knew these flowers, knew their meaning and there was no possible way they were meant for anyone but himself.

 _Forsake...Faithless...Ungrateful—_ Roy stopped his mind categorizing and listing the meanings of the flowers. He needed to maintain his focus.

“Of course, Mr. Tucker,” Roy managed to say, throat tight around his words, strangling them. Havoc shifted so that he stood just a bit closer to Roy. Roy swallowed again, it felt compulsive. “I am glad to see she made it back safely. If you have any concerns, please feel free to contact us.”

“Thank you Detective Mustang. Will you see yourselves out?”

Roy was already backing out of the room. Havoc mustered a farewell in Roy’s place, hastily stepping aside so that Roy didn’t knock into him.

“What the fuck was that?” Havoc demanded when they finally returned to the car, but Roy didn’t have an answer he was willing to voice. Havoc leaned against the hood of the car, running his hands through his hair and then down his face. Roy sunk down heavily beside him. After a moment, Havoc tapped out a cigarette with shaking hands from the soft pack he carried in his back pocket and Roy lit it without prompting. The thoughts rushing about in his skull had gone silent, an eerie, itching quiet that promised to bloom into full explosion without warning. As Havoc exhaled, Roy held out his hand but instead of handing over his cigarette like Roy wanted, Havoc tapped him out a new one.

—

Maes had seen a lot of fucked up corpses during his military career, but the one in front of him took the cake. Sure, on the outside he looked positively normal, for a corpse, but when the medical examiner had cut into him, he’d found roots instead of blood snaking along every vein. That wasn’t even mentioning his heart, which looked more like some art student’s macabre interpretation of heartbreak than an actual organ; vines stitched through the chambers and bled out of the ventricles to gather in snarls over his lungs. Exsanguinated via flora, vile.

Maes shuddered and thanked whatever deity watching that he’d only seen this through photos and not in actuality. Yet it confirmed without a doubt that whatever the military was so keen on hiding definitely went against Roy’s constant goal to keep Faerie out of Central.

Well, fuck.

Maes was scrolling through the rest of the autopsy report when a knock on his office door jolted him from his thoughts. He quickly ejected the flash drive, pulling it from its usb port. He slid it into his pocket as he called out, “It’s open.”

He relaxed when Riza slipped through the door and closed it behind her. In the privacy of Maes office, she didn’t bother with a salute. She did, however, cant her head to the side in silent question.

“You’re good, swept the office this afternoon,” he said, and a bit of the tension drained from her spine. The change only made what remained more prominent as she approached his desk, regulation boots clicking against the linoleum with each precise step.

“Good to hear, sir.” She didn’t sit in either of the chairs but she did place a calloused hand against the back of one, leaning slightly against it; only within the confines of Maes tiny space in their department would she dare relax her guard enough to stand so casually. Her fingers tightened and her knuckles went briefly white. “I just received a call from Jean. Something happened at work and Roy slipped out without a word. He’s worried.”

Mae’s stomach twisted. “Did he say anything else?”

“Nina came back,” Riza said with a slight frown. “Jean didn’t give me much more to go on than that, he sounded rather shaken himself.”

“That sounds promising,” Maes said with bright, false cheer. He looked down at the time on his computer, it was just after five. “Well, I suppose I can leave on time for once.”

A little more of the tension trickled out of her face and she offered him a tiny, weary smile. “That would be appreciated, thank you.”

Maes gathered his things and his coat as quickly as he could as Riza turned to leave his office. “Riza.”

She paused, hand on the doorknob.

“I’ll find him.”

“You always do.” Riza replied, looking him straight in the eye. She opened the door and slipped out into the outer office and pulled it closed behind her with a click.

—

Roy had blood so thick on his hands that there were days he forgot the color of his own skin. No amount of scrubbing would clean the red from him and no amount of ink would cover it up. He tried to clean them for years and that had left his hands raw and tender and peeling along the edges of his nails from scalding water and guilt.

Days like today had him slumped over a bar, tattooed hands wrapped so tightly around a cut-glass tumbler that it was a miracle it hadn’t cracked. The desire to wrap them around each other and smudge away the red dulled with each finger of whiskey that burned down his throat, but so did his judgement. He ran a tongue over his teeth and opened his mouth to speak, to test the coherency of his words against the bartender.

He paused.

Most days, he spoke in clear, unmistakable phrases with confident smiles that hid the jagged edges of his terror—old and well worn into his skull. He drank when his hands dared to shake, when he remembered perpetual twilight and the smell of blackberry flowers and the sound of bones cracking against the heat of his flames.

For a man perpetually afraid of having his words twisted against him, Roy drank a lot.

His glass was empty. His hands were red. His tongue was heavy.

A new glass was placed in front of him, he smiled at the bartender and kept his practice words trapped behind his teeth as he switched an empty glass for a full one. He took a sip and swallowed.

“Roy, I found you!”

Roy jerked and swung his head up from the tumbler nestled between the palms of his hands. Maes had his hand raised in greeting and bounced over to Roy’s corner of the bar, heedless of the other patrons glaring at his noisy entrance; Riza followed behind him at a more sedate pace, her military jacket folded over one arm. She must not have returned home yet, instead joining Maes to hunt him down. “Here to drink away your sorrows, I see. I bet if I showed you my newest pictures of Elicia you wouldn’t need something so crude to lift your spirits. Lucky for you, I have some on my phone!”

Roy raised his glass, met Maes’ eyes and downed the contents.

“Oh, don’t be like that!” Maes closed the distance between them and hooked his ankle around the stool to Roy’s right, tugging it out in a fluid motion so that he could fall dramatically into it. Roy barely resisted the urge to kick it out from under him before he could. Riza, like a civilized human being, pulled out the stool to Roy’s left and sat herself with a murmured greeting. Roy returned it even as Maes continued on, “We’re just here to help. What’s got you bothered this time, mister mopes-a-lot?”

“Go away, you’re loud...” Roy muttered, flagging down the bartender yet again. He’d lost count of how many he’d had, but one more certainly wouldn’t hurt. “But you can stay, Riza. You’re not annoying.”

“Oi!”

Riza ignored Maes as her trigger-calloused fingers slipped over the new drink placed before Roy, tugging it away before he could reach for it. “Jean called. He explained the situation as best he could, but I get the impression there’s more to it.”

“’m quite alright,” Roy said, fingers itching for the tumbler well and truly out of his reach. He didn’t need the two of them prying into his day, didn’t need to have the hopelessness of it all dragged back to the forefront after he had done so much to tamp it down and dull it with whiskey. He tapped his fingers against the bartop to stop from reaching. They left little red dots if he glanced at them from the corner of his eye. “It was just a long day s’all. ‘Nother failure in a long line of failures.”

“You know, when you say things like that you completely undermine your reassurances. And we can see through your bullshit, so I suppose that’s a moot point.” Maes jabbed a finger at Roy’s face and Roy stared at it until he went cross-eyed. When Maes lowered it, Roy noticed his features had softened. “Why don’t you tell us what happened?”

Roy laughed, dry and harsh enough to startle both his friends. “There’s nothing to say. My fault.”

“And how is that?” Riza ran a finger distractedly over the rim of her stolen whiskey and then tapped it before taking a sip. “You can’t protect everyone”

“You’re one man with a limited number of resources,” Maes jumped in, leaning over to take the whiskey from her so that he could have a drink as well. “You do the best you can.”

Roy knew they meant well, but the aching in his chest throbbed at their words, threatening to crack open and let the emotions he’d tried so hard to bury ooze out. They didn’t understand, they couldn’t. Those flowers. They’re from _him,_ they had to be.

“She came back,” Roy said, a refute to their reassurances; maybe it didn’t sound like it to them, but it was. “I can’t save them all, fine, okay.” Bile stung his throat at the thought, but they were right there. Roy could not save everyone. He couldn’t even save himself. “This’s different.”

“Roy, I don’t think—”

Roy glared at Maes. “Flowers.”

“Be that as it may—” Riza said to cut off Maes’ response. “—it’s still not your fault.”

“It is.”

“Roy, seriously, you can’t—”

“This’s different!” Roy snapped again, slapping a palm against the bartop. Smoke rose from his fingers, not yet thick enough to alert the bartender but certainly enough to tip off Maes and Riza that he was rapidly losing the fight for his self control. “She came back. They never come back, but Nina did and there were those flowers. Flowers growing on her, _from her skin._ Columbine. And, and anemone—and—”

Roy stopped abruptly, suddenly ill as Nina’s peaceful, soulless body crowded his mind’s eye and the phantom swirl of blackberry flowers clogged his nose. He swallowed and wondered if maybe he’d developed a new tick to match the nervous rubbing of his thumb and middle finger. He curled his hand into a ball to stop the movements.

“Roy.” Riza placed a hand over Roy’s fist, moving with deliberate slowness as if to avoid startling a wild dog. When he didn’t look up from the counter, she squeezed gently. “Can you take a deep breath for me?”

Roy did and held it until his vision swam and spotted; he let it out in a burst, lightheaded and skin buzzing as if he’d taken a strong painkiller. “Sorry.”

“Not here for apologies,” Maes said but his eyes were wide and a little alarmed when Roy finally looked up. Riza hid it better, but the same concern had sharpened her gaze. Maes placed the whiskey back on the counter and Roy took it with his free hand as his friend continued. “But if there were flowers on this girl—”

“Growing _from_ her, _inside_ her skin, Maes.”

“—in this girl,” Maes corrected, looking a bit green. “Roy, are you implying—”

“That Kimblee found me?” The urge to laugh burned like flames in his chest. He lowered his voice, as the urge bubbled into panic—he’d lost a large amount of control to his whiskey. “Yao agrees. Found me before you two, said he found anemone on campus. That he smelled his magic.”

Maes looked away, glasses catching the light in a way that hid his eyes from Roy. He flagged over the bartender and ordered his own whiskey, voice subdued. Roy bit his tongue, catching Riza’s worried look as he tried to swallow down the growing panic.

“I have further confirmation,” Maes said right as Roy was considering shaking the words from him. He finally looked back at Roy and Riza, hazel eyes hard over guilt or remorse or something flavored in self-recrimination. “Kevin Stenson—”

“What?!” Roy snapped, jerking so hard in his seat he would have fallen backwards if Riza hadn’t steadied him. “Stenson?”

“You know him?”

“Yes!” Roy swayed in his seat. “He’s a student—was a student. I kicked him out of my class.”

Maes stared back at him wide-eyed. “He’s our body. His entire circulatory system had been replaced with vines, which explains why we claimed jurisdiction on the investigation.” Maes said and this time Roy did laugh. Something clicked into place that had been bothering him since Yao accosted him outside the precinct. The warding Roy had on his own magic should have kept his signature unrecognizable—he couldn’t erase his presence entirely, but it obscured and weakened what the fae could sense of him. Maybe Nina hadn’t been his fault, not originally but now…

“I can’t—” Roy stopped and forced his sluggish thoughts into control. His next words were slow and slurred, but far clearer than before. “I cannot drop my guard. If our respective disappearances were not related before, they are now, Maes.”

Riza placed a hand on Roy’s shoulder, her fingers squeezing hard enough to hurt. He glanced sharply at her, blinking to clear his vision and she stared back at him, face tight. “Emergency check-in protocols.”

“Riza…”

“No, Roy.” She let her hand slide down to his elbow, resting it there instead of the harsh grip from before. Her voice remained firm as iron. “He knows where you are now and I am _not_ losing you again. You will check in with either me or Maes at least three times a day. I will inform Jean and Breda as well.”

“I do not have a say in this?”

“You do not.” She stood and glanced over at Maes. “Maes, I’m sure agrees on the necessity.”

“Yeah, I’m siding with Riza on this one, Roy.” Maes said and Roy slumped a bit more in his seat.

“Now that that’s settled, let’s get you home, shall we?” Riza let go of Roy and shrugged on her coat, despite the stifling air of the bar. She stood and offered her arm to Roy for balance. He took it with bad grace, scowling at the both of them, but he didn’t fight. He didn’t have the energy to guard his words or the desire to try. He would deal with this in the morning.

“I’ll drive you home, do we need to worry about your car?”

Roy shook his head. He’d had the foresight to walk to the bar. Riza gave a nod of approval and led him out through the maze of tables and chair as Maes stayed behind, settling their tab. The cold bit at Roy’s face as they stepped outside, stripping a bit of the fuzz from his senses. He remained silent and allowed Riza to take control. She’d get him home and tomorrow he’d work himself out.

He’d work himself out after vomiting into the toilet, head rested against the cool porcelain. He’d work himself out when the sunlight felt less like a knife peeling his corneas from the sclera of his eyes. He’d work himself out after one more glass of water, one more painkiller, one more minute staring at the ceiling fighting off the panic that had taken up permanent residence in the pit of his stomach.

He messaged Riza. He tugged on clothing. He located his keys.

Head throbbing and tongue cotton thick in his mouth, Roy hired a taxi and returned to the precinct to retrieve his car. As he sat behind the wheel, shaky enough to debate the wisdom of his decision to leave his house, something caught his attention. There, between the center console and the passenger seat, a sheet of glossy paper reflected the early sunlight. He stuck his fingers as far down as they would go and managed to pinch the corner of the sheet, slowly sliding it free.

It was a photograph from the file Riza had given him, a warning several days too late. Roy’s hands shook and the manic laughter from the night before bubbled to the surface in quiet, breathless huffs as he crushed the photo between his fingers. The glossy paper smoked and smoulders for a brief moment before flames burst to life around his hand, hungrily devouring Kevin Stenson and his blasted bed of anemone.

As the flames died, Roy calmed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANKS AS ALWAYS TO KAT! Best beta ever, she literally comes into my apartment and bullies me into correcting things. (However, despite both of us deciding this was supposed to be a short chapter, it ended up being the longest one yet...)


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: This story is part of a series!!--yes, there is only one more chapter left IN THIS PART, but there is more to come after that! 
> 
> Anyway, I am so sorry for the late update, I finished this chapter about 3 different times and ended up trashing nearly 10,000 words of content and starting over because the tone was just not right. At all. I didn't want to throw a chapter at y'all I wasn't happy with--I'm too invested in this. That being said, this is the longest chapter by far. So yay??
> 
> Please enjoy!

_Ed sat in a glade dusted with gold: the surrounding trees flickered with molten leaves, the grass shimmered in the warm moonlight, the people shone like firelight and sunshine. The people...Ed squinted, but they wouldn’t focus—too bright despite the evening hour. They danced and ignored Ed in their midst._

_Ed dug his fingers into the earth and to his flesh hand the dirt beneath the lush grass was soft but cold. He pulled them free and the dirt clung beneath his nails and in the crevices of his knuckles like gold filings. The way it glittered as it fell from his hands fascinated him and held his attention so surely that he didn’t realize one figure had separated from the dancing group until he loomed over Ed._

_Van Hohenheim stared down at him, as imposing as the day he left Ed and Al and their mother. Gold eyes blinked and Ed struggled to find pupils or sclera in the overwhelming metallic._

_“Hohenheim,” Ed managed, but the disdain he’d wanted to lace the name with sounded more like fear. His father tilted his head to the side and frowned as if he found Ed wanting. He crouched down which brought him closer to eye-level with Ed and continued to stare._

_“You are not what I expected.”_

_“Fuck you, too,” Ed snarled, stung. He should stand, but if his father stood as well, he would once again dwarf Ed. So Ed remained on the soft, cold ground and focused all the resentment he had harbored in his heart over the years into his glare._

_Hohenheim frowned. “That’s not very polite.”_

_“_ Polite? _” Ed’s anger strangled the word until it squeaked. He would have been embarrassed for it if the ground beneath him hadn’t jolted hard to the side. He dropped his hands back to the ground for stability, disappointed when Hohenheim didn’t tumble over from his crouch. “You don’t fuckin’_ deserve _polite, ya no good absentee—the fuck?”_

_The ground quaked harder, shifting the edges of the world around him as if they were made of sand and glitter. Hohenheim didn’t move. The dancers continued unperturbed._

_“You leave much to be desired,” Hohenheim said and stood, dismissing Ed just as everything faded away. “Fix that.”_

Someone shook Ed’s shoulder roughly, dragging him to consciousness. “Edward, get up!”

Ed groaned and buried his face deeper into the crook of his arm. As his mind sputtered into life he registered a chill settling deep into his ports and a twinging pain in his shoulders and lower back that promised to blossom into something truly unpleasant when he straightened up. The hands that had shook him disappeared and Ed started to drift back to sleep when a sharp smack across the back of his skull jolted him awake.

“ _The hell_?” Ed sputtered, nearly falling out of his chair in his haste to guard his head. Doctor Curtis stared down at him, unimpressed.

“Glad you’ve joined the land of the living,” she said drily. He scowled at her. “You’re a nightmare to wake up.”

“Didn’ have’ta hit me so damn hard,” he muttered, stretching his arms above his head. His back cracked loud enough that even Doctor Curtis winced. “What time is it?”

“Time for you to go home,” she said and this time Ed winced. “You’ve spent too long in this lab and I know when you’re not here, you’re in the library—whatever you’re avoiding, stop.”

Ed glanced away but Doctor Curtis forced his gaze back on her by slamming a hand down onto his desk. Ed jumped and scrambled out of his chair, adrenaline clearing away whatever bits of sleep had still clung to him and his dream faded to nothing, gossamer threads of gold dusted aside as he guarded himself against his mentor. “Fuck!”

“Edward, seriously,” she said and the soft concern in her eyes didn’t match the force with which she’d hit his desk. “You need to go home and face whatever it is that’s got you so screwed up right now.” She paused, searching his face for a moment, frowning deeper as something in his expression must have set off alarm bells for her. “...unless you’re in danger—if that’s the case—”

“No! No, nothing like that...I—” Ed swallowed and ignored the panic trying to scrape its way from his stomach into his throat. He steadied himself and tried again. “No, I’m good.”

“Good,” she said, pushing Ed’s chair into his desk with a foot before he could sit down again.

After another brief pause, as if waiting for Ed to backtrack or breakdown, she finally clapped her hands together and then pointed sharply at the exit. “Then get!”

“Okay, okay, I’m gettin’!” Ed quickly gathered up his things while Doctor Curtis watched, arms crossed. Ed hesitated, shouldering his bag onto his left side and shifting from foot to foot. Doctor Curtis sighed.

“If you want an ass-kicking so badly, come by the gym sometime.”

Ed nodded, offering her a pale smile and scampered from the lab before Doctor Curtis forcibly removed him.

—

Roy’s mission to protect Central from Faerie had one glaring flaw: it was pointless.

A useless, meaningless fool’s errand that he chased in hopes of alleviating, what...? His surplus of guilt that never missed a chance to bubble up to the surface? His lingering need to feel important? A fear so old and familiar he may as well admit it was there to stay? Who could he protect as one man in a city large enough to swallow up citizens unhindered and unnoticed? People disappeared everyday without anyone the wiser and Roy sat at his desk pretending he made a difference and, _really_ , wasn’t that an absolute sham when he also put so much wasted effort into going unnoticed, effort that could be better spent actually helping people if only that gnawing fear didn’t constantly hamper his—

Roy reached for his mug and drank deeply of the scalding coffee, the sear down his throat momentarily distracting him from his cyclical thoughts. He glanced around the room and set the mug to the side with a muted _click_.

Sunday morning had Roy in his office far earlier than usual to make up for his absence the day before. At their desks, Ross and Breda sat nursing their own large mugs of coffee in silence as they waited on Havoc. The two of them took turns glancing over at Roy: Breda searching and Ross fretting.

“So, Boss, what’s with the ass-crack-of-dawn party?” Havoc asked as he hurried into the office. He fell into his seat, somehow managing to keep his coffee from spilling. He leaned onto his desk, elbows propping him up, and chewed on the filter of his cigarette. The bright blue eyes scanning Roy’s face were alert and belied Havoc’s casual posturing.

“It _is_ rather unusual to be called in this early,” Ross chimed in, fighting back a yawn. As far as Roy knew, she had yet to hear about Nina, unless Havoc had told her. He would have definitely told Breda, however. Sharing such a small apartment as they did, Breda would have drawn it out of him even if Havoc wanted to keep quiet.

“We need to discuss Nina,” Roy said after taking one last fortifying swallow of coffee. His buzzing thoughts quieted as he ruthlessly pinned them down and shoved them into a dark corner of his brain. “And the consequences of her return.”

Ross sucked in a breath and Breda sat up straighter. Havoc let his eyes drop to his mug and he bit down hard on the cigarette in his mouth. It split where the filter met tobacco but Roy stopped its fall with a snap before it could land in the coffee between Havoc’s elbows.

“Ah, thanks, Boss.” Havoc grabbed the floating bit of rolled tobacco and rested it on his desk next to the soggy filter.

“You and Havoc went to the Tucker residence on Friday,” Breda said shooting Havoc a look. When Havoc didn’t immediately meet his eyes, Breda frowned and turned his gaze on Roy. “Why are we just now hearing about this?”

“This is the earliest time I could manage.” Roy met Breda’s eyes and whatever Breda saw in Roy’s placid expression caused him to deepen his frown.

“Yesterday, when you came to grab your keys, you could have said something.”

“Give ‘im a break, Heymans,” Havoc said gently, saving Roy from having to dredge up words sensible enough to explain the emotional turmoil that had left yesterday harshly blank in his memory. Havoc took a breath and sat up straight at his desk. “You’d’ve needed the time, too. It wasn’t...it wasn’t pretty.”

“What do you mean?” Ross asked, voice barely audible as if she didn’t really want to ask in the first place.

Havoc looked to Roy for permission and Roy gave a slight nod, encouraging him to continue. Havoc nodded back and then gave a halting account of their time at the Tucker residence, faltering for a moment as he described Nina’s state.

By the end of his retelling, Ross had to force the hand that had crawled up to cover her mouth back down to her desk. “That’s awful.”

“And currently unprecedented,” Breda added. “You mentioned consequences?”

“I did,” Roy said, taking back control of the room as Havoc curled into himself. Havoc’s hands sought warmth from his mug and Roy nearly mimicked the gesture; instead he folded his own hands, one over the other, onto his desk. “The flowers found growing from Nina were columbine and anemone. Anemone was also found next to the body on campus—a detail we do not officially know and should not repeat outside of this office—”

“Someone died?” Ross blurted and Roy nodded.

“One of my students—” Havoc startled at the answer and Ross looked ready to offer condolences, but Roy continued before either of them could speak. “—The flowers were a message—a warning, more like—for me. Riza would like me to inform you that I am currently meant to follow check-in protocols, which means that she or Maes will likely contact the office from time to time to confirm my whereabouts. However, for the near future I will be on campus.”

“Hold up.” Breda lifted a hand, and regarded Roy with no small amount of alarm. “That’s a lot of information you’ve just thrown at us with very little explanation. Check-in protocols? A dead student? Warnings? At the very least, the fact that Nina was returned ought to be addressed in more detail.”

Roy opened his mouth to answer when a sudden flare of familiar magic brushed across his awareness and the entrance door swung open. Havoc yelped, hand going for his sidearm, Ross nearly knocked over her coffee as she jerked around in her seat and Breda cursed. Ling Yao sauntered into the room, completely unperturbed by the minor chaos he’d created. He kicked the door shut behind him. “Good morning, Team Mustang!”

“The fuck?” Havoc managed, sounding strangled. Yao beamed at him and Roy pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut. Yao had impeccable timing, as always. Roy quickly tamped down the irritation Yao caused by his sudden entrance and said dryly, “Were you waiting at the door just so you could have a dramatic entrance?”

“I don’t want to hear that from Mr. Snaps-A-Lot,” Yao chirped, but his grin strained the edges of his mouth, barely more than a grimace. “But no, I wasn’t. Why? Did I come in at a bad time?”

“Where is Lan Fan?” Roy asked instead of answering.

“Watching over the wonder boys.” Yao said, waving his hand in the air. A faint flicker over his jawline drew Roy’s attention, the skin discoloring for a moment before snapping back to normal. “Or wonder _boy_ , I guess. Ed hasn’t been home in a few days, but that’s neither here nor there.”

“ _He’s_ _missing_?” The flare of panic caught Roy off guard, almost dizzying in its intensity. He had to grip his hands together to ground himself, but Yao wouldn’t have missed the sudden crack in Roy’s composure.

“What, you worried?” Yao teased and Roy glared, ice-sharp, resisting the urge to press his thumb and middle finger together in threat. Yao held up his hands. “Whoa, chill! He’s fine, he’s fine! But that’s all I’m gunna tell you, you know how it is, best friend-ex-lover confidentiality and all that.”

“I’m sorry, but who is this?” Ross asked the room at large.

“Oh, right, you’re new.” Yao straightened up only to bow low to her. “I’m Ling Yao, resident faerie expert and mage babysitter, at your service.”

“He is mostly telling the truth,” Roy said wearily, when Ross gave him a quizzical look. “Aside from the babysitting remark. He truly is our go-to faerie expert.”

“I watch your ass all the time,” Yao said, grinning sharply. “Anyway, Roy, you ready to go?”

“You’re leaving?” Havoc asked and Roy wondered the same thing, searching Yao’s face for a clue.

“Yep, I’m commandeering him to watch over campus for the big bad faeries,” Yao answered and Roy gritted his teeth together. How did Yao always have him figured out?

“We’re in the middle of a meeting,” Breda said. “Can you wait?”

“I am afraid he cannot,” Roy said, standing up. He grabbed his coat from the back of his chair and his keys from the top of his desk. “What needed to be said for now has been said. Except for this—”

Roy waited until all three of his subordinates fixed him with their full attention, Breda grudgingly. “—keep your eyes open for anything strange. Do not step in faerie circles, do not stray from marked paths and keep iron on your person. If you think you are in danger, contact me immediately. Try not to go out alone, especially tomorrow and Halloween night.”

“Fuck, that’s ominous,” Havoc said as Roy shrugged on his coat. Roy watched as his hand unconsciously went to his throat, touching the necklace there.

“And stay away from unseasonal flowers!” Yao yelled over his shoulder, before pulling the main office door shut. When he caught up to Roy, the forced cheer from before was wiped clean, leaving behind the agitation Roy had caught a brief glimpse of in the office. Yao shuddered dramatically, shooting Roy a baleful look. “I hate your office. Too much warding.”

“I fail to sympathize.” Roy led the way through the rest of the precinct before speaking again. “Why are you escorting me to campus?”

“I’m not if you’re driving.” He glared pointedly at the keys in Roy’s hand. Roy raised a brow at him.

“I suppose you are not escorting me then.”

Yao scowled at him. “Maes contacted me. He’s worried you’ll overwork yourself.”

“Ah, so that is how you knew.” Roy wasn’t surprised. “I am still taking my car. You will find me around the Alchemy Complex where you can come and _babysit_ me to your heart’s content, if you feel so inclined.”

“I will. Can’t afford you burning yourself out for no reason,” Yao said. “You still owe me, you know.”

“As if I had forgotten.” Roy bristled at the reminder of a deal made in desperate times, but kept the irritation from his face and voice as best he could. He continued toward the parking lot, hoping that surrounding himself in that much steel and iron would discourage Yao from following. It didn’t, but his sharp features twisted in distaste as he kept by Roy’s side.

“You know,” Yao said as Roy opened the driver’s side door and climbed into his car. “I’m not your enemy—I would even say that I’m your friend.”

Roy couldn’t help his snort. “That is often what worries me.”

“Don’t isolate yourself from your friends.” Yao stepped away from the car and shrugged. He looked worried but that could also be attributed to Kimblee’s possible proximity, so Roy didn’t think to take it personally. “I’ll see you on campus. Don’t be stupid.”

“Do what you will.” Roy slammed the door shut and started his car.

—

Ed stood in front of the door to his apartment but made no move to open it. The chill of the late-October morning had long since sunk into the ports of his automail and soaked up into his bones, neatly rendering his clothing useless. He shivered.

_Come on, ya coward. Open it._

Instead, Ed dropped his head forward with a dull smack against the cheap wood. If he was lucky, someone inside would hear the noise and save him the trouble of dredging up his battered bravery.

“Whatcha standing in the cold for?” A voice said cheerfully into his ear and Ed yelped, jumping nearly a foot in the air. He stumbled back, hands smacked together in defensive prayer, but his foot caught on something large and bulky. His stumble became a fall that landed him on his back.

“ _Fuck!_ ”

Winry blinked, bending a bit at the waist so that she could see him better in all his sudden embarrassment. She wore a cream turtleneck and her usual short skirt, but with thick stockings underneath; she had an even thicker peacoat buttoned up over it all. Sprawled on the ground, ass and back flat against the cold concrete, Ed would trade his dignity to be half as warm as she looked. Not that he had any dignity to trade at the moment, but it was the thought that counted, right?

“Whoa, tense much.” Winry offered him her hand, grinning. He stared at it, still trying to catch his breath. She huffed, grabbed his right hand and tugged him roughly to his feet. Ed swayed when she let go. “You crushed my bag!”

“You’re fuckin’ early!” Ed blurted.

“ _That’s_ what you have to say after so long apart?” She frowned at him and he glared back at her. “And I’m not early—I told you I was coming at the end of the month. And if you ever bothered to check your phone, you’d have known I was here! I swear, you and Al are the absolute worst to get ahold of—I had to call a cab because neither of you would answer my call! You’re paying for that, by the way.”

The door swung inward before Ed could respond, and a very worried Al crowded into the doorway. His narrow face split into a grin when he saw their unexpected guest and he opened his arms in invitation. “Winry!”

“Al!” She fell into his arms, burying her face into the crook of his neck as he hugged her back. Ed saw Lan Fan over Al’s shoulder craning her neck from the couch to catch a glimpse of the commotion. At least Ed’s faith in her and Ling didn’t go undeserved—if they had been watching over Al while Ed researched (read: hid) at the university, then that was one less thing to wallow in guilt over. Winry released Al after a long moment and shot Ed a glare. “See, that’s how you greet friends you haven’t seen in awhile.”

“I wasn’t expectin’ you!” Ed shot back, carefully not meeting Al’s eyes. He tugged out his phone and his stomach dipped at the number of unopened text messages. Ignoring them for now, he scrolled down to the one he’d received—fuck, had that really only been less than two weeks ago?—from Winry specifically stating she’d visit in a month and she was fuckin’ early—oh. “Er. Well it’s still not the end of the month.”

“You misread it, didn’t ya?” She asked, grinning at him. “Brain too big for the rest of us to keep up with and ya can’t even read a text right. And it’s the twenty-ninth, how _isn’t_ that the end of the month?”

“Lay the fuck off, it’s been a rough couple’a weeks!” Ed snapped and Winry’s eyebrows disappeared beneath her fringe. Al winced hard enough that Ed, who’d been carefully not looking at him, noticed.

“Apparently.” Winry glanced between the two of them and sighed. “Awesome, I’ve come in the middle of one of your fights, haven’t I? You coulda warned a girl.”

Al opened his mouth to speak but instead coughed. Winry and Ed quieted and Ed took the moment to finally look properly at his brother. Al’s skin remained sallow, the undersides of his eyes plum-dark, but in the days that Ed had spent cloistered in the lab—or the library, if Dr. Curtis looked close to kicking him out—nothing’d changed in his appearance for better or worse.

“Why don’t we go inside where it’s warm?” Al suggested softly, offering Ed an uncertain smile. Ed tensed, but as if she could sense that Ed was considering making a break for it, Winry stepped back and grabbed his shoulder, shoving him through the door. Her bag followed behind him, knocking into his right leg with enough force that it would probably bruise. He lost his balance and had to stumble further into the apartment to avoid falling for a second time.

“Lan Fan!” Winry exclaimed, a whirlwind of blond hair and long legs as she hurried over to the couch and left Ed and Al to stand awkwardly behind her. Lan Fan rose from the couch and returned Winry’s hug with good grace, smiling brightly at the greeting. Ed glanced around the room. Ling wasn’t there. Winry stepped back, hands gripping Lan Fan’s shoulders. “I haven’t seen you in ages!”

“It’s been awhile since you’ve come to Central,” Lan Fan agreed and Winry shrugged.

“Rush Valley’s about as ‘big city’ as I like to go,” she said, finger quotes included. She rounded on Ed, finger extended like one of her wrenches. “You and you—” she turned her finger on Al. “—sort yourselves out while I catch up with Lan Fan. It’s no fun being here when you two are acting like idiots.”

“Winry…” Al started to say but Winry already had Lan Fan by the arm and was halfway to the kitchen. Ed watched her go, wanting to follow after and escape whatever confrontation he needed to have with Al but Al’s hand on his sleeve stopped him. For a moment, they said nothing, listening to the overly-loud clatter of coffee preparations and the chatter of old friends covering as much lost ground as they could.

“Will you listen to me now?” Al asked after the silence between them had stretched out long enough that Ed was surprised that it didn’t snap when Al broke it. “Or at least sit down? You look awful.”

“You’re one to talk,” Ed snapped and then immediately regretted it. Al laughed.

“There’s my tactless older brother,” he said and sounded genuinely pleased. He tugged on Ed’s sweater and Ed let himself be led to the couch. He sat and immediately drew his knees in, shivering as warmth wormed back into his frozen skin. When he wrapped his arms around his knees, the cold of his left leg stung the flesh of his left arm. Al grabbed a blanket and draped it over him, forever selfless. “Did you eat?”

Ed nodded, tucking his chin into the valley of his knees. The blanket slid down his back, but Al caught it and adjusted it before taking his place on the couch beside Ed.

“Vending machine meals don’t count.”

“Dr. Curtis made me eat her sandwich last night,” Ed mumbled and Al tsked at him.

“Seriously? That’s it?” Al shifted until his side pressed against Ed’s and unconsciously Ed leaned into the warmth. “Lan Fan made food yesterday and there are a ton of leftovers since you and Ling weren’t here to eat it all. You should have something after you warm up.”

“ _I’m sorry_.” Ed choked on the words, tearing up as Al’s patient kindness threatened to overwhelm him. He buried his face into his knees until he managed to wrangle his rebellious tear ducts into submission. Al placed a large, slim hand against his back.

“You don’t have any reason to be,” Al said softly. Ed risked looking up and Al’s eyes glimmered, looking as watery as Ed’s felt. “I didn’t mean—what I said was the truth—”

Ed stiffened but Al now had his hand gripped into the blanket and Ed’s shirt, once again preventing escape.

“—I don’t want you constantly worrying about me. I’m not grateful for you wearing yourself down to nothing just to search for something that might not even be findable.” Al’s fingers spasmed against Ed’s spine and his shuddering breath shook the both of them “You deserve more than that. I am, however, grateful that you’ve never given up on me, even if we don’t always see eye-to-eye on how you do it.”

“I still gotta apologize.” Ed felt sick with an oily mix of relief and guilt. Of course Al didn’t blame Ed or think Ed wasn’t trying hard enough. Ed was an asshole for doubting him. Al had always believed in Ed, even if Ed was the one constantly failing to deliver on their shared goal. “I was bein’ a dick an’ I shouldn’t’ve overreacted like I did when ya already felt like shit.”

“I know you were only worried.”

“Damn right I was. _Am_.” Ed let go of his death grip on his legs to pull the blanket tighter around him. An idea that had floated in his brain ever since Al came to live with him in Central poked up its head. Al would hate it. Ed hated it. He said it anyway. “You’ve gotten worse since you’ve come to Central—have ya...have ya ever considered going back to Resembool and goin’ back to studyin’ online? Just for a bit, to recuperate while I keep tryin’ to find a breakthrough. Not permanently! Just—”

“Ed.” Ed peeked out from his blanket and met Al’s wheat-husk eyes. He saw something there, terribly familiar and frustratingly impossible to read. “It wouldn’t make a difference. I wasn’t any better there than I’ve been here. It’s been...gradual.”

“But you said—”

“I know what I said, but—” Al raked his free hand through his hair, sending the soft strands into disarray for a brief moment before they fell flat again. “I didn’t want to worry you and I made Winry and Granny promise not to say anything...I’ve incorporated that data into my research and didn’t think it would affect yours…”

Al trailed off, glancing at Ed and then at the hand now resting in his lap. His shoulders slumped. Ah, the look was guilt. Anger, hot and quick, burned through Ed at Al having lied to him, at Winry and Gran going along with it; it disappeared just as quickly. Suddenly exhausted, Ed held his breath for a long moment and then exhaled slowly. “What?”

“I didn’t want to worry you more than I already had,” Al said again, fiddling with the material of his pants. “And don’t get angry with Winry and Granny, I think they really wanted to tell you, but I’m very persuasive when I want to be and—”

“Al…”

“—so you see,” Al continued on, ignoring Ed in his rush to get his words out. “There’s no point sending me back to Resembool, is there? I wouldn’t magically get better and we’ve already spent so much of our lives apart—and now that I have a choice, I’d really rather not.”

“Are ya done?”

“...yeah.”

“‘M not mad,” Ed said with a crooked twist to his lips that could have passed as a smile. He meant it though; aside from the brief flare up, he couldn’t muster up any anger to direct at Al. Exhaustion and affection, and stronger still, disappointment in himself, blocked that spark from catching flame. “I just wish you’da told me. I don’t like that you think ya have to keep secrets from me.”

Al’s grimace happened so quickly that Ed could almost convince himself he hadn’t seen it. “I’m sorry.”

“Is there something else?”

“...no.” Al bumped his shoulder against Ed’s, but Ed had heard the hesitation. He wouldn’t push it, not now when they’d just mended the jagged edges of their relationship back together. Maybe it didn’t even matter, whatever Al thought he needed to keep hidden. Maybe it meant nothing.

“Okay.” Ed finally let go of his knees and stretched out the kinks in his cold-stiffened joints. As he settled back into the couch, he bumped Al’s thigh with his fist. Wanting to change the subject, he jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the general direction of the kitchen. “So, is today the day you confess to—”

“Brother!” Al exclaimed and Ed grinned, an actual, honest grin. Al lowered his voice to a hiss, eyes sparkling with avenging mischief. “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll talk to Winry if you admit you’re pining after Mage Mustang and do the same.”

“No fuckin’ way!!”

“Are you guys done being idiots?” Winry asked, poking her head around the open doorway between the livingroom and kitchen. Ed scowled at Al and Al smiled innocently back at him, so Ed turned the scowl on Winry. She beamed. “Oh good! I’ve been itching for some quality time with my babies.”

Ed’s scowl morphed into open-mouthed horror. Right, of course she would want to take him apart. His automail worked fine, didn’t even stick when he moved, but he sure as hell hadn’t kept up maintenance on it and Winry would know. He turned back to Al, who’d directed his gaze at the ceiling, unwilling to associate with a doomed man. Traitor. Ed forced his mouth into an approximation of a smile. “How about we eat breakfast first?”

Winry’s own smile froze on her face and her blue eyes sparkled dangerously. “Okay, yeah. A dead man deserves his last meal.”

“It was nice knowing you, Edward,” Lan Fan chimed in from the kitchen as the sounds of her opening the fridge and pulling containers of food from inside it filtered into the apartment like a funeral dirge. “Rice or noodles?”

Ed groaned and dropped his head into his hands. At least he hadn’t busted anything, so maybe he could hope for a swift death.

—

Babysitting Roy took Ling to Central Perk. His campus eyes and ears already had a table, both occupying the same side in anticipation of Roy’s arrival. Vato Falman saw them first and he nudged Kain with a sharp elbow to wake him from his doze.

Roy barely spared breath for a greeting.

Ling sat next to Roy as he explained their current predicament with barebone efficiency to Kain and Vato. Vato fidgeted, fingers curling and uncurling as if to reach for a nonexistent pen; Kain listened with his own hands folded placidly on the table in front of him, dark eyes wide and anxious behind his glasses. Ling zoned out, having heard all this before, until Roy started to describe his particular plan.

“You’re doing what now?” Ling asked, cutting Roy off mid-sentence. Roy glared at him, annoyed.

“I plan to monitor the area around the Alchemy Complex for the foreseeable future—there has been enough evidence of fae activity to warrant the precaution at this time and—”

“Are you insane? That’ll drain you,” Ling interrupted again, frustrated despite himself with Roy’s sheer stubborn self-sabotage. “You _know_ that’ll drain you. Yeah, sure, you pack a hell of a punch, but even you need to sleep. No one who’d take over for you can get even a tenth of the range you can, so what’s the point? _Not to mention_ —” Ling raised his voice when it looked like Roy would interrupt him in turn. “—you’re just painting a giant neon target on your back by displaying that much magic.”

“Better me than one of my students.”

“So you’re intentionally trying to draw Kimblee’s attention now?” Ling demanded and Roy flinched, imperceptibly enough that the other two at the table would miss it. The cool, expressionless plane of his face gave more away in the end—in the time that Ling had known him, that mask only slipped into place when Roy’s emotions had built up to something he couldn’t reliably manipulate.

“He already knows I am here.”

 _Mulish, utterly mulish_ , Ling thought irritably, ready to tear his own hair out. He opened his mouth to continue arguing but Kain gave a little cough, drawing the attention of the table; he even had his hand half raised, patiently waiting to be acknowledged—and if that wasn’t the most adorable thing Ling had ever seen...Kain gave Roy an apologetic grimace as he spoke. “I agree with Yao. Monitoring the school will only work so well and it hinges on your ability to maintain a high output of magic for an extended period of time.”

“It’s inefficient,” Vato added. “And unsustainable.”

“I do not need your approval—”

“How would you avoid raising suspicion amongst your peers?” Ling asked.

“An additional charm.”

“Making this endeavor even more draining,” Kain pointed out.

“Have you ever done something like this before?” Vato again.

“Yes.”

 _Yeah, back when you weren’t intentionally dampening your own magic!_ Ling thought at Roy, aggressively trying to get him to understand exactly why this was such an inane idea without having to say it out loud. Roy pointedly kept his eyes on the two people across from them. He was just as frustratingly bullheaded as Edward but infinitely less straightforward about it.

“We can’t stop you.” Kain smiled softly, the expression gentle in its momentary sadness. Did Roy understand what he was putting his team through, or had he completely lost himself in self-recrimination somewhere in the past few months? “But maybe consider that you might be making decisions based on what will punish you the best, not what will do the most good.”

Smart kid.

“Duly noted.”

Dumbass mage.

Not much more was said after that. Kain and Vato both agreed to alternate replacing Roy in the evenings, but they wouldn’t be capable of maintaining the sort of vigil that Roy intended to keep. Ling would replace them where he could—he didn’t say as much, anticipating Roy’s broad refusal to accept his aid—but he’d make his intentions known after Roy retired late in the night. He would have to leave Lan Fan with Al and Ed for now.

When Kain and Vato said their goodbyes and took their leave, Ling turned on Roy.

“Three days—you have through Halloween to mess about with your stupid plan and then we’re finding a new one.” Ling tapped the table hard with his index finger to emphasize his point and to avoid doing the same to Roy’s forehead. Roy had completely withdrawn behind his placid mask; the eyes that stared back at Ling didn’t so much as flicker with repressed emotion.

“Is that an order?” Roy asked after a moment, toneless. “A threat?”

“I’m not your keeper.” Ling searched Roy’s face for any cracks but his expression remained smooth and opaque as glacial ice. He gave up. ”But if you were thinking clearly, you’d see I’m right. You have responsibilities you can’t drop just because you’re feeling guilty.”

“Your concerns have been noted and ignored.”

Ling slapped the table hard. His palm stung but Roy didn’t so much as flinch. Ling covered his face with both hands and exhaled hard. “Damn it, Roy I swear—”

“Three days.” Roy said and Ling peeked through his fingers to see that the mask had slipped just a bit. Roy stared at his own hands, folded across each other on the table, one thumb rubbing over the false array inked into his skin. “Just give me those three days and then we will try it your way.”

“That’s all I’m asking for.”

“If that is all,” Roy said, still mostly toneless. He pushed his chair out from the table and stood. “Then I will start now.”

“I’ll bring you a coffee, later.” Roy didn’t acknowledge the offer and Ling watched him go.

—

Day one passed without flowers or mushrooms or interruptions.

Across the barriers between worlds, a figure matched Roy in posture and practice and bided his time.

—

 _“What is your plan today?”_ Riza asked, voice crackling over the speaker of Roy’s landline. He had the receiver rested on his kitchen table as he rummaged in his refrigerator for something edible. His stomach rebelled against the idea, but Roy could only afford so many self-destructive behaviors in such a short amount of time, so he would force himself to eat.

“I’m returning to campus,” Roy replied. He slammed the refrigerator door shut when it offered up nothing but condiment jars, beer and a half-empty carton of milk. Those contents rattled sharply at his rough treatment, tempting Roy to slam the door again just for the sheer violence of the action.

_“What was that?”_

“Just me testing the shock-absorption capabilities of my fridge,” Roy replied, voice cheery. “They’re sufficient.”

_“Roy…”_

“I’m fine, Riza.” Roy gave up on locating food and lowered himself into a chair at the kitchen table near the receiver. He placed an elbow on the surface and rested his cheek in the palm of his hand, sighing quietly through his nose. The rushing of his thoughts had quieted slowly over the last forty-eight hours; he’d meticulously compartmentalized each bit of panic and anger and guilt into their own respective boxes, all neatly tucked away to be later dusted off and examined at his leisure. For now, he had a job to do. He repeated it to himself, like a mantra. _I’m fine. I’m going to campus. I’m doing my job._

 _“Don’t exhaust yourself,”_ Riza said after a moment of silence. _“Have someone help you.”_

“I’ve already asked Kain and Vato for assistance.” Roy drummed his fingers against the table. Wondering if Riza already knew, he added. “Maes also conscripted Yao. I’ve been given three days.”

 _“I’m sure you’re pleased by that.”_ She didn’t sound surprised. It may even have been her idea.

“Pleased as punch, I sure do love having him around,” Roy said dry enough he could taste sand on his tongue. He could almost hear Riza quirking a brow at him and he sighed. “That was an uncharitable tone. He actually _is_ quite helpful.”

 _“And he understands the situation better than any of us.”_ Another, longer silence. _“Remember to take a break. Please.”_

“I came home last night, didn’t I?” Roy said. He’d come home, late and drained and reluctant, but as he’d lain down and stared at the ceiling during the quietest hours of the night, his brain began to unpack every thought and emotion he’d carefully boxed away that day. In the end, he’d drowned everything in the whiskey he kept under his bathroom sink and fell into nightmares. Roy shook his head to clear it and picked up the receiver, switching it off speaker so that he could take Riza with him into his small living room. He gathered his keys from the coffee table and clutched them tightly in his palm to keep them from jingling. “I’ll grab a coffee.”

_“I swear, Roy, you’re going to keel over one of these days—”_

“Why do you call me Roy on the phone, but sir in person?” Roy asked to derail her. He wandered back across the room to the counter separating the kitchen and living room and leaned his back against it. The dock for his landline rested against the wall and a little light blinked helpfully to inform him that he was on the phone.

 _“Because it’s no fun harassing you if I can’t see your face,”_ she replied quickly, startling a laugh out of Roy. _“You’re too good at masking your voice.”_

“I’m going to have to do something about my expressions—Maes told me the other day that I’m easy to read.”

_“Only to us.”_

“I suppose that’s to be expected,” Roy said, rolling his shoulders to release the tension. He slumped against the counter, the edge digging into his lower back. He wanted to run a hand through his hair but remembered the keys in his hand right before scratching them across his scalp. They jangled at him. “I should go.”

_“Remember to check in.”_

“Yes, mom.”

She chuckled, quiet and strained. _“If that’s what I have to be.”_

“I prefer friend, honestly.”

 _“Hmmm, I’ll consider that, but it may be more trouble than it’s worth,”_ she teased gently and Roy’s lips tugged into a soft smile of their own accord, sappy in a way that he’d never show in public. Even in Roy’s darkest hours, she did her best to bring him up and it was mornings like these that Roy knew he’d go to the ends of the earth to keep her friendship. She’d already done as much for him. _“Now, get to work.”_

“Yes, ma’am!”

—

Ed left the apartment with spirits at least marginally higher than ground level. He wanted to stay home to catch up properly with Winry and mend a few more of the edges still sharp in his and Al’s relationship, but he had to at least occasionally make a show of going to class if he wanted to retain his scholarships. Stepping outside nearly convinced him that no, actually, he _didn’t_ need those scholarships and staying inside his nice, centrally-heated apartment was nothing less than an absolute necessity. The unusual cold persisted, his ports twinging their complaint no matter how many layers Ed wore to insulate them. He buried his face further into the scarf Winry had made him several years ago and started the twenty-something minute walk to campus.

Ed didn’t read as he walked like he usually would. That required Al as a lookout, because, despite his protests, Ed _would_ end up walking out in front of a car without even noticing until he’d been knocked clear out of his shoes. His thoughts kept him occupied enough. While in a rare moment of tact, Ed had managed not to outright demand what Al might be hiding from him, he also couldn’t shake the certainty that there was _something_.

That certainty cluttered and clogged the inside of his skull against his will. He trusted Al with everything but his own health, hypocritical as that was, and so he hoped that whatever secret Al felt the need to keep was something mundane. He wouldn’t pry.

He wanted to fucking know, though, damnit.

As he approached the Alchemy Complex, a familiar head of inky-black hair caught his attention right before he stepped through the automatic doors. Mustang sat on his coat in the middle of the lawn that stretched between the Alchemy Complex and the neighboring building. He had one hand buried into the earth and the other wrapped around a paper cup with Central Perk’s logo mostly covered by his fingers. The sight was strange enough that Ed stared for a long, bemused moment. How had Ed only noticed him now? Mustang’s face was clear and flawless as usual, yet the clench of his jaw and the sag in his posture spoke of a bone-rooted exhaustion that Ed had never seen in him before. Maybe he’d used makeup to cover up the telltale bruises of sleepless nights?—he seemed like the type to do something like that. Ed ignored the twinge of sympathy that fluttered to grab his attention and forced himself to go inside.

Ed took notes absentmindedly on his first two classes but as he stepped out into the crowded hallways, he could barely recall which classes he’d even attended. His stomach growled and he checked his phone.

Mustang still sat in the middle of the lawn. The only evidence that he’d moved at all was the crumpled paper cup at his side and a deeper curve to his spine as he hunched against the cold. Ed sighed and turned on his heel to march off toward the library and the bustling cafe nestled on the first floor.

—

In the end, there was not much Roy could do but watch and wait. There had never been much Roy could do, not alone and not with his ragtag team of soldiers and officers and grad-students.

So that’s what he did. He watched the grounds outside of the Alchemy Complex, fingers on his right hand buried to the second knuckle in the dirt and those on his left curled around a too-large and too-light coffee which he eventually crumpled and set aside. The morning had since given way to early afternoon, but the unseasonable cold continued to bite through his layers of clothing. As he concentrated on the pulse and beat of energy that made up the campus proper, he had forgotten to cling to his thin heating charms.

A gradual, confusing presence took steps toward Roy, fading away into nothing the closer it came. In addition to his heating charms, Roy must have also dropped the charm discouraging others from approaching him. With an effort, he drew himself back into his surroundings just as someone spoke.

“That looks fuckin’ uncomfortable.”

Roy rolled his eyes up from a set of knees, momentarily blinded by overcast-diffused sunligh. He blinked and squinted and Edward swam into focus. Edward had his face scrunched up adorably, head tilted to the side as he tried to puzzle out Roy’s arguably alarming behavior. Roy didn’t have it in him to smile.

“I have dealt with worse.”

“The question is—” Edward began, shifting so that he was no longer limned in blurry, too-bright light. He dropped to the ground beside Roy and Roy noticed that both his hands held coffees of their own. “—why you’re dealing with it now?”

“For reasons you will most certainly scoff at.”

Edward hummed, not rising to the weak taunt. He kept his silence as gold eyes scanned the grass. Pockets of students gathered around blankets and textbooks, huddled under bulky coats. November would soon call on them, but the day tasted of early snow. Edward dressed similarly as the other students, blindingly red, hooded coat buttoned up to his chin and kept close to his neck by a hand-knitted, lumpy black scarf. The coat reached all the way down to mid-thigh and looked horribly warm. He brought his knees up to his chest, scuffing the heels of his boots into the soft dirt and Roy lost himself for the moment following the way the silver pieces twinkled in the dulled sunlight when Edward fidgeted. Suddenly a paper coffee cup cut off his line of sight, steam curling enticingly from the open mouthpiece in the plastic lid. Roy startled hard enough that his hand popped out of the dirt and he lost the last of his concentration.

“What?”

“Coffee,” Edward said shortly. Roy directed his eyes from the cup to Edward’s face and caught his bronze cheeks flushing pink. “You’ve been out here for a while and I thought you could use somethin’ hot to get ya through whatever weirdass thing it is yer doin’”

“You are being uncharacteristically kind to me.”

Edward scowled. “You don’t hafta point it out an’ shit, I just—”

“I am sorry, what I meant to say was thank you,” Roy said, swallowing down the urge to keep poking at Edward until he blew up. That was stupid when Edward was so obviously offering up an olive branch. “I appreciate it.”

Edward flapped his free hand in the air, brushing him off. “Whatever. So’s this a usual Monday thing, or you branchin’ out your weird?”

“Branching out,” Roy said, digging his hand back into the soil. Edward glanced at his fingers but shrugged, sipping his own coffee. Roy looked a bit closer at Edward then, unused to this lack of antagonism. The mild light of the day caught in Edward’s hair where it hung in a sleek band of gold down the red of his coat and a few shimmering strands spread across his shoulders like fine embroidery from static and the dry, wintry air; his eyes matched it in brightness and softness and it was that softness that piqued Roy’s interest. “It has been a long few days.”

“Tell me a-fuckin’-bout it,” Edward said with more enthusiasm than Roy expected. Ed scrunched his nose up suddenly, bringing attention to a near-invisible spray of freckles across its bridge. “You okay? I know I ain’t really the person to ask, but, I dunno. You don’t seem okay? And no one else is here to ask or whatever...” Edward trailed off, pursing his lips. Roy swallowed a mouthful from the coffee Edward had brought him—made unexpectedly to his tastes—to hide his surprise.

“I am a little shocked you care.” Roy faced Edward more fully so that his expression was visible and would hopefully temper the statement. Edward shrugged and stared at his own toes. “But I suppose, to answer your question, it is rather complicated.”

“Never a straight fuckin’ answer,” Edward muttered to himself, but it didn’t hold any heat so Roy let it go as if he hadn’t heard anything at all. Edward spoke louder. “Must be if you're trying to plant yourself on campus. Despite your dubious claims to godhood, I don't even think that’d make it possible to become a tree.”

“You would be surprised what pure, stubborn spite can achieve.”

“Not fuckin’ likely.” Edward pushed himself up to his feet in a single movement, wincing a bit as he put pressure on his automail arm. The cold must wreak havoc on the port in his arm. “Well, enjoy spite-growing roots. I got class.”

“Thank you for the company,” Roy said back, mock saluting him with his new coffee. Edward actually smiled and saluted back before turning on his heel and traipsing back toward the Alchemy Complex. Roy watched him go and the surrealness of the conversation left him wondering if it had actually happened or if he’d hallucinated the whole thing in his exhaustion. Only the coffee, warm and tempting in his hand, assured him that he had yet to completely lose his mind. He lifted the cup to take a sip and his hand shook—he wouldn’t be able to keep up his vigil for much longer—Ling had been right to limit him to three days. With proper rest, he could last far longer, but the prospect of returning to his empty home where his thoughts could haunt him unhindered as they had the night before soured in his stomach. He’d really rather freeze on the lawn, thank you.

Roy let another hour pass before giving in to the insistent complaints of his bladder. He stood up and faltered under a sudden wave of vertigo. His skin buzzed and he nearly dropped his coffee trying to regain control of his balance. The dizziness passed as quickly as it had struck, but it left behind a gnawing hunger in the pit of his stomach that, now that he was aware of it, he couldn’t ignore. He scowled at nothing, grabbing his coat which he had spread out underneath him from the ground and set off toward the central food center, using the opportunity to stretch his stiff legs.

—

_An alien night sky stretched like mulberry stained silk above Roy, milky with clouds and spotted with stars. He couldn’t move, pinned in place by a command._

_“It is funny,” Kimblee said, sitting with his legs crossed and Roy’s head cushioned on one thigh; he threaded spidery fingers through Roy’s hair. Flowers in red and purple blossomed along Roy’s body, a riot of color in the muted night air. “I always thought having your Name would be more satisfying, but what is the fun in having a toy that just lays still?”_

_Roy’s heartbeat spiked and he struggled to breath. Only a handful of people had Roy’s Name and Kimblee had never been one of them. Kimblee tugged at his hair, yanking Roy’s head back so that their eyes met. Kimblee smirked down at him, feeding on Roy’s panic as if it were ambrosia._

_“Well, what do you say? Should I release you, my Salamander?”_

_The air shifts, and the tension in the space between them cracked open and spilled out as Roy surged up and twisted until he had Kimblee underneath him. One of them was screaming and since Kimblee’s mouth was split in a grin full of too-white, too-sharp teeth—it must have been Roy._

_The skin of his neck split beneath Roy’s choking hands, sizzling as fat leaked like tears through his fingers and soaked into the earth beneath them. Roy held on, Kimblee continued smiling, fathomless eyes bright, manic, pleased._

_“That is more like it—I like you with a bit of fight.”_

_His face melted into something golden and raw and broken and then Edward took Kimblee’s place, teeth bared in a rictus, and his eyes glaring, accusing and unamused despite the wound blackening deep into his neck. Roy tried to let go, but Edward grabbed his wrists and sneered at him._

_“Yer a fuckin’ hack, ya know that? Can’t even kill a Faerie properly, fuckin’ coward.” Blood, molten and metallic, bubbled up through Edward’s teeth and drained down the sides of his face to join the hissing fat muddying the dirt._

_“Get over yerself.”_

Roy woke. The details of his dream dispersed with his rising awareness, leaking away until all that remained were the impressions of grease on his fingertips and a scream in his throat. He sat up and swung his feet over the side of his bed, quickly stumbling over to his bathroom.

He switched on the light, flinched at the brightness, dropped down on his knees. Reaching under the cabinet beneath the sink, he pulled out the whiskey squirreled away there, closer to the front after he drank from it the night before. He swallowed from the bottle, liquor burning down his throat long before his thoughts caught up with his actions. He drank again once they had. Again when that did nothing to drown out the sweeping panic in his head.

His hands slipped on the bottle, smearing red and oil. It hit the floor, cracked and spilled across the linoleum in a wash of unstained amber. When Roy stared at his hand, nothing but skin met his scrutiny.

—

04:23 Heading to campus now.

 

04:25 The hell you doing up so early?

 

04:29 I could ask you the same thing.

 

04:30 Elicia had a nightmare, poor dear

 

04:32 Tell Elicia I sympathize.

 

04:33 Roy, you good?

04:33 Do you need me to come over?

04:34 I could heat you up a glass of milk ;)

 

04:35 You’re a terrible friend and I hate you.

 

04:36 No you don’t

04:36 You love meeeeeeeeeee

04:36 Also

04:36 Don’t forget to email your students if you plan on cancelling your lecture

 

04:38 Damn

04:38 It’s Tuesday, I forgot

04:39 I suppose I don’t hate you

 

04:40 Love ya too, buddy

04:40 Oh and Roy

04:40 Don’t overdo it

—

Ed checked his phone as his students packed up their assorted possessions. Two messages vied for his attention, one from Winry and the other from Al.

_Come get drunk with me tonight Alchemy-geek!_

_Winry wants to get drinks tonight to celebrate Halloween. You up for that?_

He left them unanswered, stuffing his phone into his coat pocket so that he could quickly gather up his own things to allow the next professor space to set up her lesson. She waited patiently by the door, adjusting her bag higher up on her shoulder as she watched Ed scramble about.

“Sorry, there’s chalk dust everywhere,” Ed said absently as he passed. She laughed, pale green eyes crinkling at the corners.

“It’s an alchemy building, it would be a little strange if there wasn’t any.”

“Fuckin’ true,” Ed said and then mentally kicked himself—how unprofessional could he get? She just laughed again as he left, obviously unbothered. Ed gave her a sheepish smile and snuck around her into the hallway.

 _How drunk we talkin?_ Ed sent back in a joint message after wrestling his phone back out from his pocket. With his head down he stepped outside into the sunlight, wishing desperately that it would provide warmth along with light as the cold of the day sunk its teeth into his clothing. If clouds suddenly rolled in and spit snow at him, he wouldn’t have been surprised. Unconsciously, he glanced over to the spot Mustang had haunted the day before. For a moment, he didn’t see him, and then like a mirage blurring into reality, he caught sight of Mustang’s hunched, broad shoulders. Had he even gone to his lecture? Ed frowned at his back, feeling concern more prominent than the day before rise up in him, but it was still early yet. Maybe Mustang would fuck off home by the time Ed finished a couple of hours of research in the library.

...or maybe he wouldn’t. The sun slowly slipped past the horizon, smearing shadows into broad strokes across the ground as Ed exited the library nearly seven hours later. Roy remained in the same spot as before. Ed stopped and contemplated the blurry, defeated lines of Roy’s back and came to a stupid decision in the span of a minute. He freed his phone from his pocket and called Al.

 _“Brother, you_ do _know how to call,_ ” Al said by way of answering. Ed rolled his eyes even though he knew it was a useless, unseen gesture.

“Don't like talkin’ on phones. S’not the same as being unable.”

_“So to what do I owe this rare pleasure?”_

“Well….” Ed stalled, looking back and forth between Mustang and the strip of sidewalk in front of him. He huffed out a breath. “If I don’t come tonight, would Winry murder me?”

 _“Probably,”_ Al said without hesitation. _“I might, too, if you’re bailing just to stay at the lab.”_

“Nothing like that!” Ed’s gaze returned to the spot where Mustang sat, struggling to focus; for someone with so much presence, he blended into the scenery with uncanny ease. “It’s gunna sound stupid if I explain, but I think it might be important.”

_“What kind of important?”_

Ed hesitated again but decided honesty would work best in this situation, despite the inevitable embarrassment. “Mustang’s been acting fuckin’ weird, so I’m gunna try to drag his ass out to get some food or something before he freezes to death.”

 _“ Huh,_ _”_ was all Al said, voice distracted. Ed frowned and when the subsequent silence stretched out, he even pulled his phone away from his ear to make sure the connection hadn't cut out. It hadn't.

“Yo, earth to Al!”

 _“Sorry, sorry. Yeah, okay. That sounds important. I'll make your excuses to Winry.”_ he paused again, but this time it sounded like it was to switch his phone to the other ear. _“Just know you'll have to make it up to us later!”_

“Yeah, yeah,“ Ed said flippantly, already walking over to Mustang. “Thanks, Al. I'll see you later tonight.”

 _“Sure thing,”_ Al said. _“If he doesn't end up taking you home, that is. Have a good night. Bye!”_ Al hung up before Ed could even get properly worked up. He glared at his phone, shoving it into his pocket with unnecessary force.

“Stupid meddling brother…” he grumbled under his breath. Like the last time, Mustang didn’t seem aware of him. Ed took a seat—cold soaking immediately through his pants from the ground—and shivered. He pulled his knees up to his chest and hugged his arms around his shins, gleaning no warmth from the abundance of complicated machinery replacing half his limbs.

—

“You’re still here, huh?” Roy hadn’t even noticed Edward approaching this time. Yao’s magic had flooded in ahead of him, familiar enough that Roy hadn’t bothered to return to himself until he registered Edward’s voice instead of Yao’s. Something anxious and without reason slipped into the pit of his stomach. Roy looked up, but Edward had already sat down beside him, drawing his knees up to his chest like the last time. He glanced over at Roy and raised an eyebrow in a perfectly sardonic arch. He was alone, which meant Yao was watching from afar. “You got roots yet?”

As Roy scanned the horizon for Yao, he also took his hand from the dirt and wiggled his fingers at Edward. He found Yao leaned against a tree a good distance away and when Roy caught his eye, Yao tapped at his wrist where a watch would be. Roy looked pointedly back at Edward, ignoring him. “I am apparently not spiteful enough.”

“Yeah, I see that.” Edward chewed at his bottom lip, hiding the action by dipping his chin and nose into the folds of the the lumpy black scarf from yesterday. “I’m gunna do something stupid and ask ya to come get food with me.”

“...Oh?”

“You look like you could use a hot meal and a drink. ‘M probably the last person you’d _wunna_ do that with, but I know the signs of overworking and you honestly look like you’re right on the edge of a major fuckin’ breakdown...” Above the line of his scarf, Edward’s cheeks flushed pink and he glanced to the side, shielding his face behind his fringe. Roy wanted to take offense, but spending over two days bleeding magic into fruitless spells and two nights drowning in nightmares and whiskey had robbed him of his will to retort.

“I would love to. However…” Roy started, unenthusiastic and emotionless, but stopped when Yao’s magic spiked irritably, jerking Roy’s attention back to him. He could barely make out the movement of Yao’s lips as he dramatically mouthed _Go, you moron._

“You’re too busy becoming a tree.” It was a statement, Edward’s voice dry and flat to match Roy’s. His expression locked down, hidden behind something forcibly bland. The loss of his usual energy struck Roy like a slack rubber band suddenly pulled tight and snapped against his skin, dispelling a good deal of his apathy. “That’s cool and all—”

“Actually,” Roy cut Edward off, blinking tired eyes to give him a moment to clear his head. Even without Yao harassing him, Roy realized an outright refusal here might setback, if not completely destroy, the tentative truce he and Edward had reached over the past month. The thought twisted his stomach: Roy had enough failures on his hands not to want to add another. His monitoring of the campus grounds had proven just as useless and draining as Yao and Kain had predicted, anyway. Roy dusted his hands against each other, his fingertips burning with cold and Edward watched him warily. “I spoke too hastily.”

“Meaning?” Edward stared straight ahead, giving little of his face for Roy to read.

“I will take you up on that. No roots, after all.”

“Wait, really?” Wide, gold eyes snapped to Roy’s face and Edward’s earlier mask shattered into grudging relief. He furrowed his brow and tilted his head to the side as if that would give him a better angle to examine Roy’s face, maybe searching for a trick. Roy couldn’t help the smile that pushed at his lips, weak as it was. Edward took that as confirmation. “You like Cretan? I know this little shack that serves the most authentic Cretan this far into the city. Got good drinks, too, but it’s quiet ‘cause nobody fuckin’ knows about it.”

“Quiet is nice.” Roy stretched his arms above his head, his spine popping sharply in protest over the sudden movement after holding still for so long. He didn’t stand yet, still hesitant to leave campus unattended—a few hours remained until his three day limit came to an end, but what would he possibly accomplish in such a short amount of time? Edward stood and stuck his hand out to Roy.

“It’s fuckin’ freezin’, Mustang,” Edward said, spreading his fingers out in invitation to Roy. “Get yer ass up off the cold ground.”

Roy grabbed his hand and let Edward tug him to his feet with surprising strength. Roy bent and grabbed his coat and when he straightened again, he let his earlier smile broaden just a bit. “I can fix that.”

“Fix…” Edward trailed off as Roy rubbed his thumb and forefinger together in a silent snap. Heat blossomed out into the air around them, dry and cozy, instantly chasing away the cold Roy had allowed to seep into his bones. Edward gaped.

“Holy shit, you’re like a human-space heater!” Edward exclaimed, sidling closer. “You really are some kind of alchemical genius.”

Roy shrugged, letting the comment slide. No use breaking the tentative camaraderie by starting an argument. “How far is your Cretan restaurant?”

“About twenty or so minutes?” Edward loosened his scarf and started walking in the general direction of one of Central’s several parks. Roy followed, finally relinquishing his hesitation from before. No one would replace him tonight, now that he’d spent his three days, and nothing had come of the wasted time besides. So Roy let go, moved on forward and tried to make the best of the rest of his night before he went back to the drawing board.

—

Ed hadn’t really expected Mustang to agree, but the nervous flutter in his stomach definitely betrayed that he’d wanted him to. As best he could, he pushed that feeling away and tried to enjoy the spread of after-dinner sweets on the table between them. He was mostly failing, skin buzzing a bit with the alcohol he had foolishly decided to order and brain derailing regularly as he caught himself time and again fascinated by Mustang’s stupid hands and face. Mustang seemed unaware of this as he nursed a small glass of tsikoudia the owner had distilled herself, sipping at it gingerly as he glanced around the tiny establishment.

Conversation had not been stilted so much as cautious as Ed skirted issues he knew would start an argument and Mustang answered in mostly courteous and somewhat hesitant ways. Ed ordered them drinks that he knew Ms. Kokinos made well to quell a bit of whatever exhausted, defeated tension still hovered around Mustang’s shoulders like a mantel and it helped a bit now that they had finished their meals.

“I should have asked when we first came in, but how did you find this place?” Mustang asked as he placed his now empty glass onto the table and turned sharp eyes back on Ed. Ed nearly dropped his own glass, snapped out of staring at Mustang’s fingers yet again. He had unfairly fucking nice hands for a bastard.

“Ms. Kokinos needed help with some repairs and—” Ed interrupted himself, sluggish brain catching up with what he was saying. Mustang raised an eyebrow at him and Ed downed the last of the clear liquor remaining in his glass so that he could put it down and cross his arms over his chest (of course, he could have just put it down, but even Mustang’s stupid eyebrows were distracting—all sharp lines and neat arches). “—actually, I don’t wunna get fined.”

Mustang blinked slowly at Ed as he tried to trace Ed’s thought process. He had to at least be tipsy, no way he would have missed that reference sober. “Fined?”

“Yeah, ya know, for the unlicensed alchemy and all that?” Ed uncrossed one arm so that he could wave it in the air. “It’s yer whole schtick with me, ain’t it?”

“You do know that you have never actually been fined for unlicensed commercial alchemy, right?” Mustang asked, with a stupid little smile curling his lips that wasn’t quite a smirk and wasn’t quite happy, but it still brought Ed’s attention back to his mouth. He shook his head to clear it and thought he heard Mustang huff out a breath of laughter as he spoke again. “If you think I am wrong, go ahead and give me an example.”

“Yeah, alright! Back when…” Ed scrunched up his nose and mouth as he drew a blank, because, yeah, Mustang had heckled him—and even tried to arrest him, once—but Ed had never _actually_ had any hiccups with the law that resulted in more than a night in a holding cell. Now that Ed thought about those, however, it was always Mustang or Jean who got him out the next day.

“You cannot think of an instance, can you?” Mustang looked smug and it was a decidedly better expression than the blankly miserable one he’d had over the past couple of days; didn’t make Ed want to punch him any less, but it was still an improvement.

“You still buried me in a hole,” Ed muttered under his breath and Mustang actually laughed this time, loud enough that Ed didn’t have to doubt his own ears.

“You basically dared me to, remember?”

“Whatever.” Ed’s cheeks heated. “So why _haven’t_ I been buried in fuckin’ fines?”

Mustang paused and thought on that for a long moment, as if carefully choosing his words. “I do not think you were doing anything wrong—a license may be required to perform all commercial alchemy, but I believe it should really only apply to specialities, such as architecture or medicine, where mistakes could actually cause harm.”

Ed fought not to look at the transmutation marks barely visible on the ceiling where he had mended the beams a year before. Ed did know what he was doing, but he also agreed with Mustang, even if he wouldn’t admit it. As alchemy and society advanced, the way they coexisted changed and an amateur could do a lot more damage than good.

“So you skirted the system,” Ed said, connecting Mustang’s statement to his suspicious lack of fines. Ed groaned, slumping into his chair. “Al was fuckin’ right, you _have_ been helping me out. Damnit.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“I am! It means I can’t hate on you indiscriminately anymore.” Mustang surveyed the table and its clutter of plates and glasses in a pointed fashion and Ed pushed himself back up to sitting so that he could properly scowl. “This doesn’t count—”

“We have also survived lunch together without killing each other and then willing sat down to coffee,” Mustang interrupted and Ed’s cheeks heated yet again, burning up to his ears. “Why, Edward, are we becoming friends?”

“Shaddup,” Ed grumbled but it held no real bite. Mustang laughed and like his stupid hands and his stupid mouth, it was a really nice laugh, deep and rumbly. Yet, Ed could also tell that somewhere at the back of his amusement Mustang still hid exhaustion and misery. It wasn’t exactly like looking in a mirror—Ed didn’t see a copy of what he still had swirling around in his own brain as much as he saw a reflection, rippling and piecemeal on the surface of a disturbed lake.

“Would you like to go for a walk?” Mustang asked, disturbing Ed’s melancholic thoughts. “I think maybe I should walk off whatever that last drink was and it would be nice to do so in friendly company.”

“Can you do the space heater thing again?”

“You really know how to charm, Edward.” Mustang huffed a bit, but it came out through grinning lips and sounding more like another laugh. “But yes, I believe I can keep us warm for a bit.”

“Nice.”

—

Kimblee unknowingly mirrored Roy with the way he thrust his fingers deeply within the ruined soil around him, tiny flowers like explosions taking root and dying as he bled magic across the barrier between Faerie and Amestris. Black stretched in a thick swathe both before and behind him like a ribbon, licking up into the leafless branches of a forest of charred and broken trees. Nothing grew nor lived in the Salamander’s Tongue, not anymore.

He sat with patience, eyes open but unseeing as he swept his magic just beneath the barrier between Faerie and what he now knew to be Central University. Spots of magic pinged against his like blips on a radar, but they were insignificant bursts of life compared to what he searched for. He let his magic further saturate just below the known boundaries of his new hunting grounds and he waited.

Magic, muted but vast, nearly brushed the tendrils of his own. It disappeared. Reappeared. Disappeared. Reappeared once again. The patterns of a broken watch, ticking away a beat too slow or too fast at any given time. Even without the distinctive taste and burn of fire, Kimblee was certain he knew to whom that magic belonged.

Kimblee grinned, teeth sharp and bright in the low-lit twilight.

“Found you.”

The magic disappeared again, but Kimblee continued to wait. He had time.

—

Moonlight lit the night with a glow that shone more golden than silver to Ed’s tired eyes. It was pretty, skittering across the dying leaves of the park as they walked through and sparking on the dry grass, but the color bit at Ed’s rare moment of content, as unsettling as it was nostalgic.

Mustang kissed the knuckles of Ed’s gloves when they eventually parted. It was a simple, slightly unsteady gesture but Ed felt his cheeks light up with a flush and for a moment he forgot the strange light. When Mustang had suggested they share a cab to their respective homes, Ed declined—and then declined again when Mustang insisted, looking nervous to leave Ed alone, but his apartment was so close and Ed was so lightheaded, that he needed the cold air to right his brain before facing Al or Winry.

The walk home skewed his perception of time, dragging the five minutes out into an eternity as he fought the weight of his automail and sleep deprivation. He started to sweat beneath his thin coat despite the chill in the air and eventually shrugged out of it. The golden glow from before sparkled along his skin like mist rising from a lake at the break of dawn—brightening and waxing as he rolled up his left sleeve to his elbow and peeled the glove from tan fingers.

“Really fuckin’ need sleep,” Ed muttered, watching the smoking glow twist and swirl rapidly with the movement of his arm. At the corner of his eye something flickered in the darkness of the trees along his path, shadows stretching tall, stretching wide, sliding along corners like spills of ink before collapsing back into the rough, crooked pillars of trunks when Ed jerked around to look properly. His heart made a valiant attempt to escape through his throat and Ed upped his pace to a jog, pulling his sleeve back down to discourage another flash of gold along his pores. What the fuck was happening to him?

His and Al’s apartment was on the first floor to account for Al’s weakness and their mutual dislike of elevators. So when Ed skidded to a stop outside their door, he didn’t have the excuse of a staircase to explain the hitch in his breath and the red on his cheeks. He should catch his breath, but as his heart slowed the shadows moved again and the mist rose like faerie dust from his skin, trailing in a flickering line underneath his front door before disappearing as he blinked.

He gave up, sanity apparently lost for the night and pushed into the apartment after fumbling with his keys. The lock of the door behind him did nothing to soothe his nerves and he nearly tripped kicking off his boots in the doorway. The cool darkness of the entryway calmed him a bit, but Ed pushed forward into the living room. With only the couch-side lamp lit, shadows coated every available surface, waiting to stir if Ed let his guard down any further. Al didn’t look up from his book as Ed walked in, Winry asleep on his lap.

Ed inhaled, sucking air deep into his lungs until they ached, before releasing it all as if he could also expel the paranoia eating away at the corners of his mind with the carbon monoxide. It didn’t work. He dropped his bag to the floor, wincing when it clunked reproachfully, reminding him that his laptop was still jammed inside.

“Did you have fun?” Al asked from his curled position on the couch, blankets wrapped around his thin shoulders like a cape. Something flickered along the edge of Al’s silhouette in wisps of gold, trailing the ground to where Ed still stood in the doorway; Ed scrunched his eyes shut, willing it away.

“Brother?”

Ed forced his eyes back open and smiled, the edges of his mouth dragging against the expression. The gold had vanished, leaving behind the tarnished shine of Al illuminated by the lamp standing guard beside the couch. Maybe it was the alcohol spinning hallucinations tonight, tracing auras in the air and flickering shadows to life along park pathways. “I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ed said, already heading through the living room toward the back of the apartment where his bedroom lay. “Just gunna brush my teeth and then head to bed, though. That cool?”

“Yes, I suppose, but are you—” Al said, but Ed had already crossed into the kitchen and then into their shared bathroom, shutting the door behind him. Winry’s toiletries lay scattered across the sink, mixing in with their razors and toothbrushes like they’d always existed there and the image eased Ed’s bizarre panic for a moment. He ran the water and peeled away his remaining glove so that he could cup his hands beneath the gradually warming flow. His nose burned with cold and he bent low over the sink to splash hot water over his face. He repeated the action until the warmth of the water suffused his skin and eased his jittery nerves.

When he straightened, the mirror reflected back a stranger.

Ed inhaled hard enough that he choked, panic rising like a wave to crash through him. Wide eyes stained gold from corner to corner stared back at him and dark skin was shot through with the same gold, like lightning lived in the reflection’s veins; too-sharp teeth crowded an open, terrified mouth. The glass cracked and Ed stumbled away from the sink with a yelp, back slamming against the door behind him. He slid down it, knees weak, and hit the floor hard.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” He muttered, words slurring together. “What the _fuck_?”

Calm, sudden and eerie and numb, brushed through him. The panic irritating his heartbeat into dangerous speeds flooded out as if displaced and swirled across the tiled floor in translucent, golden eddies. Even that disappeared between one rapidly calming breath and the next and Ed found himself confused as to why he was on the floor in the first place.

A rap on the door vibrated through his back.

“Ed, hey, you okay?” Winry asked when he sat up and opened the door.

“Yeah, just slipped,” Ed said, scratching the back of his neck. He swayed a bit on his feet, exhaustion making itself known. “Not sure how, though. Must be drunker than I thought.”

“Uh-huh, and the mirror?” She pointed over his shoulder and he glanced back, surprised to see it cracked in three jagged pieces.

“Huh, I dunno,” Ed said with a shrug. He yawned, lethargy leaving him unconcerned. He brushed past her, patting her shoulder absently as he did and wandered into his bedroom.

By the time he slipped into bed, he had already forgotten the face in the mirror.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed this (super late) update!! I feel like it's very much a nothing happens, nothing happen, oh shit, something happened??? kind of chapter, but I hope it was fun to read nonetheless~
> 
> Also, if you're wanting to keep tabs on this, I often comment on progress on twitter! But I'm most active on tumblr, if you ever want to shoot me a line! I'm also hoping to compile a...thing about bit and pieces and relationships in this universe that wouldn't really pop up in the story itself but that you may be interested in knowing?? If there's anything like that, please hit me up and I'll try to include it!
> 
> See you next time!!

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are, of course, greatly appreciated! You can find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/CatieBrieFic) and [tumblr](http://catie-brie.tumblr.com/), so come hangout with me! I also sporadically update about fic stuff on both those platforms!


End file.
